Manuela Infante, Kundura Sahne’s upcoming guest with “How to Turn to Stone?”, continues to experiment with non-humanist theater in this work and pushes back against the idea of the human as the measure of all things.

Gülin Dede Tekin – Argonotlar.com

Playwright, screenwriter, director and musician Manuela Infante is one of the leading names in contemporary theater: an artist who takes issue with anthropocentric theatrical practices, who has spent many years exploring how the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman are produced, and who is in pursuit of a new kind of theater. She is a researcher who sees, and seeks to understand, theater not only as a place for telling stories but also as a laboratory for a kind of embodied philosophy-making.

Manuela Infante is also the first Chilean theater artist to be invited to the Venice Biennale, in 2019, with her plays Estado Vegetal and Realismo.

In Estado Vegetal, Infante pointed to our failed relationship with nature through concepts such as plant intelligence, the vegetal soul and plant communication; in Realismo, she shook up our stereotyped ideas about objects; and in
Metamorphoses, she led her audience to question whether voice belongs to humans alone.

In How to Turn to Stone?, which we will have the chance to see at Kundura Sahne, she continues to experiment with non-humanist theater and challenges the idea of the human as the measure of all things. The realities the project confronted during its research process show once again how we exploit the planet and human beings in the Anthropocene. She says, for example, that workers handling heavy metals in copper refineries in Chile’s mining regions practically turn to stone, and that after they die their insides turn out a coppery green. She takes a close look at how laboring bodies resonate with geological formations, and at their histories of production and depletion.

As the three performers onstage tell stories of stones through texts and sounds, they strive to show that humans are not the most important thing in the world, bringing together fragments of worn-down stories and creating various geological landscapes with the pieces they stack. Many other things may be more important than humans, like nature, or like stones. Stones that are never born and never die, that simply ‘remain’ through their sheer mass. With the questions “What does the world look like from the perspective of resilient, nearly indestructible stones? What if we tried to imitate that which is never born, will never grow and will never die?”, the play carries out its own resistance on the theater stage.

Infante believes that theater suffers from a human invasiveness that must now come to an end, and her How to Turn to Stone?, which we will have the chance to see at Beykoz Kundura on November 4-5-6, is an eye-opening work on the explorations of contemporary theater. It is also an unmissable opportunity for anyone looking for something different in theater in Türkiye, where in recent years we have mostly seen text-driven productions.

*This article was originally published by Argonotlar.