TERRIBLE FISH

Adaptation and direction: Simon Bakhouche

Adaptation and set design: Patrick Belland

Assistant director: Pierre Dolivet

Costumes: Martine Ritz

Scenery: Jo Pinture

Image creation: Frédéric Bourreau

Music: Philippe Gohard

Performers: Eric Aubry, Karl Breheret, Philippe Devaud, Séléna Hernandez, Richard Fouillet, Philippe Gohard, Vanessa Grellier, Alain Lathiere, Caroline Menard, Denis Marcais, Steve Moreau, Béatrice Moreno, Sandrine Papin, Christelle Touze

Duration: 70 min.

TERRIBLE FISH is inspired by confessional poetry of American poet Sylvia Plath, The base for the performance is her poem Three Women written for BBC radio in 1962. The poem is written for three voices and takes place in a maternity ward of a hospital during one night. The performance Terrible Fish focuses feminine identity via female poetry. It employs an intuitive, entirely fragmented structure that leads into an abstract performance where performers reveal diverse layers of female condition in relation with oppositions, such as life/death, health/illness, delivery/miscarriage, conscious/unconscious. Terrible Fish is a multi-layered performance that fuses theatre and dance elements with elements of both conceptual and body art.

Performingunit is a new performance group founded in Breda in the beginning of 2000. It consists of experienced professionals who share diverse cultural traditions and artistic histories. They regard all their creations primarily as communication modes. The point of departure is research in the area of performing art, based on two questions: what can the body do and how to do things with words? They elaborate their performing language as a language of action, distinct from other art disciplines. Their work explores the ideas of human condition especially focusing the issues of contemporary identity, that is contemporary individual. Performingunit refuses an idea of an "ideal" performance and regard their works as "unfinished and changeable".