hcmf// Eating a Man

A new performance opera from composer Christian Winther Christensen, stage director Anna Berit Asp Christensen and Danish emsemble Scenatet.

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 Danish ensemble 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.