AND
© Maarten Vanden Abeele

"In ancient Peking the icy Princess T. nurses a hatred of all men.
Suitors who seek her hand must answer the three riddles she poses or die.
Every man who has taken up the challenge has failed. Then a stranger comes to town, the son of an exiled king. The unknown prince solves the riddles and demands his reward."

"On the first day of the rehearsals we went to the fishmonger to buy fish, because in fact this performance is (secretly) about floundering fish, about fish gasping helplessly for air."
(Grace Ellen Barkey)

The first act is set to music by Rombout Willems, with a nod to Chinese opera. After that there is a lot of original music by Maarten Seghers and Angélique Willkie, as well as music mixed by Grace Ellen Barkey.

"But the princess killed both the father and the son. And then a strange thing happened. The palace changed into a house of glass and all at once the princess lost the ability to speak. The people saw her behind the glass, opening her mouth, but there was no sound.
She was like a fish, a beautiful fish. And the people of China stared at her, they stared and stared and were so silent that they lost their memories of sound. They could not remember a sound."
(Grace Ellen Barkey)

A few years ago Grace Ellen Barkey decided to put on three pieces by Bartok: The Miraculous Mandarin, The Wooden Prince and Bluebeard’s Castle.
As a result of the absurd loss of the rights to The Miraculous Mandarin, this piece was transformed into Few Things, which was received with much enthusiasm.
The Wooden Prince is the next in line, and would be set ‘in a space no larger than a puppet theatre’, which resulted in (AND), a loose adaptation of a Persian fairytale

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"In ancient Peking the icy Princess T. nurses a hatred of all men.
Suitors who seek her hand must answer the three riddles she poses or die.
Every man who has taken up the challenge has failed. Then a stranger comes to town, the son of an exiled king. The unknown prince solves the riddles and demands his reward."

"On the first day of the rehearsals we went to the fishmonger to buy fish, because in fact this performance is (secretly) about floundering fish, about fish gasping helplessly for air."
(Grace Ellen Barkey)

The first act is set to music by Rombout Willems, with a nod to Chinese opera. After that there is a lot of original music by Maarten Seghers and Angélique Willkie, as well as music mixed by Grace Ellen Barkey.

"But the princess killed both the father and the son. And then a strange thing happened. The palace changed into a house of glass and all at once the princess lost the ability to speak. The people saw her behind the glass, opening her mouth, but there was no sound.
She was like a fish, a beautiful fish. And the people of China stared at her, they stared and stared and were so silent that they lost their memories of sound. They could not remember a sound."
(Grace Ellen Barkey)

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