Humus vertebra

Trio Humus vertebra gathers the three figures appearing in solos Fidèle à l’éclair (Claudio Stellato), havran (Jaro Vinarsky) and babil (Eric Domeneghetty), from The Scarecrow Cycle, a series dedicated to this emblematic figure.

The starting point for this hallucinatory fable is the scarecrow, this vertical being, absurd and exposed to all winds, standing between earth and sky. This figure haunts the piece, but secretly, from within. In this trio, you will find all the ingredients typical of Karine Ponties’s original work: wonderful atmospheres, a strange, tender comicity tainted with profound doubt, acrobatics, a puppetry-like use of set, and short films projected on stage, all expertly woven. The graphic score by Stefano Ricci, author of the illustrated book Humus vertebra, portrays hybrid characters, apparitions somewhere between human and animals. A fragile, yet sharp poetry sharing that instant at the heart of illusion: the uncertainty of being.

It is difficult to describe the scarecrow, this poet of ancient times who reigns from the edges of fields: an impostor, a bogeyman, an ogre, a ghost, a protester, a crucifix, a no-way street sign, a tower, an hourglass…

For Karine Ponties, a scarecrow is both touching and contradictory, a lonely soldier of terror who has never actually scared anyone. He belongs to the imagination. This vertical being is man’s double, a self-portrait that keeps its own name under silence. 

An abandoned being, a being in abandonment. 

Giving life to a scarecrow is to become alive again, to bring back to life, to put pieces back together, to relearn. Trying to reach that place where the dual movement of vertical falling and elevation can co-exist.  The difficult birth of a body and a word that are linked and which begin over and over again, in perpetuity. 

This trio is the result of the deconstruction and gathering of the three characters created around the same theme in solos babil, Fidèle à l’éclair and havran. Catered out of their initial context, they find a new life, together in this performance, Humus vertebra.