'Le Bétyle d’Ail' by Nils Alix-Tabeling, Brussels

The Bétyle d’Ail is a new performance by Nils Alix-Tabeling, produced and curated by Komplot. The performance, inspired by Marcel Aymé’s novel ‘La Vouivre’, borrows from the visual language of an Operetta to display a love relationship between a mythical creature from French pagan folklore, and a macabre sculpture of a fallen medieval soldier. Both characters compose together one body, the rotten soldier is merging with the slithery creature, digested by her, her dress forms her lair and her lair is composed of his reorganised body parts. In this way the living-dead and the immortal fairy can engage in a lighthearted conversation on the parameters of their mutual immortality, while witnessing their merging. The operetta will unfold the thematics of sexuality, desire and frivolity, seen here as as positive and critical notion opposed to dogmatism. The play salutes queer authors like Colette and Verlaine in a grotesque and macabre celebration of the human body in its glorious grossness and chthonic drives toward the inner cavities, seen as spaces of merging together and organic conversations.