Mandragora

What happens when the landscape screams back? Is her haunting voice loud enough to make the forest tremble? Mandragora is a contemporary folk tale: a joyful act of transformation and the queer resistance of unstable bodies.

The ancient legacy of the mandrake root – a unique plant-human hybrid – spans thousands of years of history. From Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages, her magical and medicinal properties were harnessed and traded across Europe and beyond. When the church and state systematically erased healers and their communities during the medieval witch hunt, they also severed the rootsongs of care and knowledge to the land, and weeded botanical ecologies associated with magic.

The mandragora slowly disappeared from recorded history, but never left the soil. On stage, uprooted and uplifted, her catchy songs weave a tale as old as the earth herself: of empires and spells, of love and resistance.

About the makers

Erik Peters is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher engaging with the worldbuilding potentialities seeded in the act of storytelling, uncovering how speculative fiction can germinate new universes of being. Through collaborative formats of making, researching and staging, they explore queer ecology as a roadmap to the possible worlds emerging from a world in planetary crises.

credits

Written and performed by: Erik Peters

Sound design, AV and production: Lance Laoyan

Visuals: Deborah Mora

Costume: Orla Kelly and Jip van der Hek

Headpiece: Ratri Notosudirdjo

Movement direction: Lily Philip Vötter

Production support: Orla Kelly, Carla Peters, Pia Canales, Aimée Phillips

Documentation: Cian Redmond

Diva mentor: San Cha