Lecture Performance

Between man and machine

Kris Verdonck’s work is usually described as ‘live art’. It comes very close to the plastic arts, but is also very theatrical. In Performatik he presents a two-part programme.

When the evening starts the audience are for twenty minutes immersed in a quite extraordinary sound environment that Verdonck has realised in association with Hans De Man from the Foton label and Gabriel Séverin from the Laboratoire Central. This is followed by a ‘lecture performance’. In this lecture-plus-conversation, illustrated with images, Verdonck will talk about his past and future projects. At the heart of his work lies the relationship between man and machine in our high-tech world. Man tries by means of science to attain the realm of the perfect, absolutely controllable, infallible – and therefore divine? – but this quest fills him with an acute sense of alienation, fear and solitude, of Unheimlichkeit.

In Kris Verdonck’s ‘theatre work’ the characters are quasi-cyborgs, intermediate beings, in transition between human and robot and suffering from being neither the one nor the other.