Eating a Man

Tickets* £22 // Under 30 £8
Advance booking required

*£2 of the ticket price paid for this event goes to the Lawrence Batley Theatre Building Improvement Fund

Content warning: This performance will feature live cooking (including animal meat) on stage.

Ensemble Scenatet:
My Hellgren cello
Vicky Wright clarinet
Rowland Sutherland flute
Matias Seibæk percussion
Fei Nie piano
Kasia Ziminska violin
Clara Stensgaard vocals 

Anna Berit Asp Christensen staging and direction
Christian Winther Christensen & Anna Berit Asp Christensen video
Maria Pi Houmann light design
Mette Hornbek Hansen technical manager

Christian Winther Christensen (Denmark, 1977)
Eating a Man (2021) 60’ UK Premiere

Click here to view programme note

With Eating a Man, composer Christian Winther Christensen and stage director Anna Berit Asp Christensen have embarked on a musical and personal voyage exploring the concept of the unknown and the alien. The performance opera has its starting point in Winther Christensen’s decade-old mocumentary-work Documentation about Apu Sarkar, wherein Winther Christensen agrees to eat an Indian man after his death. The purpose of the ritual is to honour the deceased by letting his spirit live on through the consumption.

Now, ten years on, the work has been reimagined by Scenatet and new questions have emerged; questions concerning the symbolic meaning of cannibalism, the possibility of honourable cultural exchange, and the nature of the experience of alienation. Eating a Man does not give any definitive answers but allows the audience to not only answer these uncomfortable questions for themselves, but also to interrogate the root of this discomfort.

Eating a Man is a performance opera commissioned and produced by Scenatet in partnership with November Music, SPOR festival, and hcmf// as part of the Sounds Now project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

Also supported by The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, KODA Cultur and William Demant Fonden

Photo credit: Mary Fluri