A Magnificent Crossbreeding of Protein and Tinplate is a generative music theatre performance with audience interactive/participatory aspects. It is inspired and devised based on Heiner Muller’s Despoiled Shore/Medeamaterial/Landscape with Argonauts. The audience is invited to explore this performance ecosystem, a deconstructed landscape, a fragmented environment, where individuals can be found playing music, reading, singing, being.

A Magnificent Crossbreeding of Protein and Tinplate is a posthuman vivarium. The “I” in this space is collective and visitors are invited to transit, inhabit, indulge and experience this world, to interact with the performers, the objects and the space. The piece is an alive performance organism, controlled through a network of computers. It evolves as time passes, and as the performers and the cybernetic system react to the audience’s presence and movement in the space, generating a succession of unique and unexpected situations.

A Magnificent Crossbreeding of Protein and Tinplate is designed to run for 4 hours and the audience can enter and leave the space as they please. Due to the nature of the performance and the space limitation, the audience might be asked to explore the space carefully, as well as be open for interaction with other human and non-human beings.

This piece of generative music theatre is the final of a series of experiments, part of my PhD practice-based research on interactive music theatre, taking place at the University of Sussex, supervised by Thor Magnusson and Nicholas Till and funded by AHRC.

Concept/Direction/Music: Thanos Polymeneas-Liontiris
Production/Assistant Director M. Eugenia Demeglio
Text by Heiner Muller

Devised with and performed by: Gonçalo Almeida (PT/NL), M. Eugenia Demeglio (IT/UK), Theresa Elflein (DE/UK), Nikos Ioakeim (GR/NL), Katerina Kostantourou (GR/NL), Arthur Leadbetter (UK), Stephanie Pan (US/NL), Friso van Wijck (NL)