A Surreal Journey from Birth to Death: behind the red curtain that rises on stage, the grand story of a life unfolds.

Crawling, bawling, shitting, falling, getting hurt, jumping, cutting ties, ingesting drugs, loving, fucking, clinging, smashing into walls, falling in love again, giving birth, experiencing the existential and psychedelic void of birth, educating, changing, feeding, sucking, disappearing, aging, dying, smiling.

Cycle chooses to capture the scattered fragments of a life in order to better trace its outlines and grasp the invisible transformations taking place within. Beneath a joyful chaos that shifts between forms and genres lies a frenzied quest for identity—a desire to seize the ungraspable as time leaves its imprint on the body.

A stage adaptation of Ruth Gwily’s wordless graphic novel, Cycle playfully and extravagantly depicts the surreal journey from birth to death, including motherhood, through 62 tableaux. The spaces between them are just as crucial, for it is in these hollows—echoing the depths of the self—that the mask for the next scene is chosen.

Through this absurd cabaret laced with a touch of vaudevillian flair, choreographer Kimberley de Jong and director Jon Lachlan Stewart embark on their first collaboration, at the crossroads of physical theatre, puppetry, dance, video projection, and live performance.

Artistic Vision

In Cycle, two characters step out of the graphic novel’s pages to perform their surreal, symbolic rituals in front of an audience, as though consciously aware of themselves as performers. This adaptation uses dance, theater, and video to explore the complex dynamics of a male-female relationship and the existential highs and lows of life.