H, an Incident

“Razor-sharp, comical and vulnerable.” This is how the Nederlands Cultureel Persbureau describes H, an Incident by Kris Verdonck. The work of the Russian author and dissident Daniil Charms (or Harms, hence the H of the title) is at the basis of this crazy, cruel opera. Charms’ absurd texts are not so very widely known and that’s a real shame. They combine an irresistible sense of humour with the most whimsical of fantasies. In his oeuvre, people continually disappear, they get lost, become unrecognizable or fall to pieces. Between the lines, you readily discover the unlivable Russian society under Stalin. Kris Verdonck confronts Charms’ world with ours. Also today, privacy and individual freedom are under pressure. We mostly scramble our private data ourselves through the social media. We are observed by cameras everywhere. Everything we say, all our comings and goings can be made public everywhere at all times. Personal information has even become a commodity. In H, an Incident, an Icelandic choir represents the mass, which only now and then breaks up into individuals. Surrealistic figures they seem picked right from Photoshop. One simple push on the button and their identity disappears. Delete.

Visual artist, architect and theatre maker Kris Verdonck is active on the borderline of several disciplines. He has often before chosen literature as a starting-point, as in K, a Society (Kafka) or M, a Reflection (Heiner Müller).