Dates
| 18.08.2023 / 19:30 |
Information
Last Night of the Deer is a show by Jānis Balodis and Nahuel Cano, telling the story of a roadtrip and a deer crash in a snow storm. It is a live music, theatre and spoken word performance. The piece lingers between a spoken word concert and storytelling, moving towards a collective dance moment at the end.
In December 2021, Nahuel Cano was traveling from Amsterdam to Riga. Jānis Balodis picked him up from a ferry in Klaipeda. They were driving. It was late in the evening, already dark, and a severe snow storm started right after they left Klaipeda. They decided to take a smaller road, and there they hit a deer.
The Last Night of the Deer is a story about that one December evening when they visited Lidl, refuelled LPG in Viada and met an anthropologist, hit the deer, crushed a skull, got covered with blood and feces, were running from dogs, and were barely accepted in a taxi. It is a story about all-too-human forests and the more-than-human spirits that inhabit it.
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Idea, direction: Jānis Balodis and Nahuel Cano
Producer: Ieva Briede,
Light advice: Dina Beināre
Co-produced by:
International Festival of Contemporary Theatre HOMO NOVUS and Contemporary Art Festival ANTI
Implemented as part of ACT: Art Climate, Transition project. Supported by EU programme Creative Europe.
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in English with CZ subtitles
75 minutes
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Jānis Balodis was born in 1987 in Riga when it was part of the USSR. He grew up in Riga when it was (and still is) a part of the Republic of Latvia. Back then it was a place that was very much trying to catch up on things that were absent during the 50 years of occupation, like Neo-liberal free-market capitalism and free and fair elections. He has been working in theatre professionally since 2009 as playwright, dramaturg and occasionally as a performer. Jānis is a recent graduate from DAS Theatre in the Netherlands. He also has been teaching drama at school and playwriting at the Latvian Academy of Culture. His main interests in theatre are related to society, asking – how are we here together? And are we together at all?
Nahuel Cano was born in Neuquén, Wallmapu, known today as Argentina’s Patagonia. He lives and works between Buenos Aires and Amsterdam. He is an actor, theatre-maker, and an autodidact sound experimenter. His practice is based in the modification of the given relationships that are created in a performative space, through and beyond the body. His field of artistic action is mobile, exploring the possibilities of performance, installation, sound, and theatre. Currently his explorations are sound and space based, in an attempt to listen and sound differently. In 2020 Nahuel graduated from the DAS Theatre Master program in Amsterdam. At this moment, he is working on a tryptic of sound pieces with the experimental music ensemble Modelo62. He is also developing a platform and subjective territory from which to keep expanding his research and solo work: Kütral – Nahuel.
