Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Our reason for existence can be expressed in taste, not words!

Two seasons ago, the Portuguese dramatist Patricia Portela came to Vooruit for the first time with her Flatland trilogy. Back then, the audience was kidnapped by an attention-craving James Bond. Now, Portela will be taking an entirely different approach. For Banquet she will be inviting 120 guests to celebrate the end of mankind as a sociological and political concept. Banquet is a project with performers, a musician and a chef. Together they’ll create a delicious performance that will combine an evening dinner, a concert and a lively debate about cloning and immortality in the future.

Patricia Portela was recently awarded a prize in her home country Portugal for her Flatland trilogy, which was performed in its entirety at the Vooruit festival Say it now. The artist feels equally at home in Flanders, though. Not only does she have a close bond with the dance and performance company deepblue, but Vooruit is also proving a likeminded partner eager to support her productions.

Patricia Portela on Banquet :

“Imagine you are invited to celebrate the ending of Mankind as a politically and sociologically complex concept, carrying thousands of years of unfinished and unresolved History. Imagine that at the same time you are also celebrating the first new clones that you have contributed for yourself by attending this “Symposium”.
Clones who will be the future “homo-narrationalis”, a new emotional man with an enormous historical, political, cultural and sociological database, and yet no personal link, no empathy, no envolvement with any past facts.
A man aware of the fictionality of his roots.
A man with a possibility of starting over, of having a second chance.
Are you ready to take in your hands the decision of that last jump into an unknown model of mankind?”