Derevo, Ketzal

Review in Issue 17-2 | Summer 2005

Ketzal’s origins are ‘voices, morning mists, walls of rain and everything that was before it’. A cast of two women and five men – this is Derevo, second generation: one original founder member (director/performer Anton Adasinsky) and six members of Derevo Laboratorium. These new performers are exceptional, particularly a woman who has the serenity and poise of a beautiful long vase. To a soundtrack of hyper-paced cartoon pinball music and strobe lighting, a big white-nappied white-bearded baby enters carrying a human body in a bin bag. A grey fabric wall behind reveals a window, through which we witness images of fleeting beauty-floating humanity. There follows a frenzied flesh orgy of hopping, barking, bird beasts. A tumultuous avalanche of impossible images: a six-legged woman elegant in a green skirt, two torso-less dancing red skirts. Languid limbs and liquid spines. Anton in red boots and trousers torn to the knee and a chicken face, prancing to fairground music. Male cockerel palaver, images of the aftermath of war, redemption, ritual, sanctity. Carrying a totem pole to the front, a red coil of rope spills off of a woman’s hairless head. As the space fills with water, and an enormous sunrise lifts from the horizon of the stage, hieroglyphic humans in huge kaleidoscopic dresses dancing wet and sopping and slapping at the walls, laughing in delight. I cease thinking and can only feel lost and found at the same time in images that are both raw and sublime. At the close my companion (a Florentine cook and non-theatregoer) couldn’t leave his seat. Like me, the first time I saw a Derevo show in 1989, he was overwhelmed, full and delighted, not wanting this experience to end. This show gets to ‘that’ place.

Presenting Artists
Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Feb 2005

This article in the magazine

Issue 17-2
p. 29