Infamous Offspring

INFAMOUS OFFSPRING

Greek mythology re-mastered through the universe of Ultima Vez: this is Infamous Offspring. In Wim Vandekeybus' latest creation, a whole new cast of actors and dancers ventures into the labyrinth of ancient tales. On stage as on screen, dance merge with the words of poet Fiona Benson to create a unique new world.

All ancient stories revolve around gods, as projections of the extreme experiences of the human life. Zeus and Hera are the nucleus of the Greek pantheon, surrounded by a very lush offspring. How do these descendants relate to their parents and to each other? All together, they form a patchwork family, where all members have their own strengths, ambitions and flaws. Jealousy, adultery, greed and many other aspects that belong to the human experience were infused and amplified in these unreachable characters, so that we could mirror ourselves.

The Greek world of gods is never-ending: universal tales retold throughout history branch far away and are still hold true to our society today. Many variants of these stories keep being alive at the same time, which is the very core of the mythological narrative. As writer Roberto Calasso said, “everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way. If, out of some perversity of tradition, only one version of some mythical event has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds." It is in this multifaceted context that the space for artistic imagination emerges and the world of Ultima Vez unfolds.

Daniel Copeland and Lucy Black play Zeus and Hera, who, appearing only on screen, remain distant, unreachable divine parents. At their side, the flamenco legend Israel Galván embodies Tiresias, the blind prophet who will communicate purely through rhythm and body language to the performers on stage.

Hephaestus is one of the main characters in Infamous Offspring, the god of fire and of forging, who as soon as he was born was already thrown from the Olympus and remained crippled. Due to his impairment, Hephaestus develops outstanding skills as the blacksmith of the gods. The rejected becomes then the skilled and the indispensable, the only worker.

In the show, Hephaestus is portrayed by Iona Kewney, a Scottish painter and contortionist, who transposes the key features of the crippled fire god into an imaginative language. All the divine siblings are performed on stage by young international dancers, opening the gaze on Greek mythology to a broader, contemporary and universal approach.

Fiona Benson, a poet whose dark imagination is solemnly infused with lyricism, reworked the mythology and imagined the text for the performance. Infamous Offspring is her theatre debut: poetry, like dance, is an abstract form of conveying something without literally pronouncing it.

Like in several of his previous pieces (like Blush, Puur, Traptown), Wim Vandekeybus develops the visual narration through several media: cinema coexists with stage performance, dance with spoken word. All these languages enhance and exalt each other for a unique and ever recognizable signature.