Alice in Wonderland (Alicia en el País de las Maravillas)

Asterions Hus is an artistic project led by Peter Kirk and Tilde Knudsen. First formed in Copenhagen in 2003, it is an artistic project under eternal development and carried by curiosity and the urge to explore the unknown and untried. They are especially known for their very physical and experimental interpretations of the great tales. Always with audiences of all ages in mind, they have gone their own ways with Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Macbethencountering the great narratives and their personal interpretation s. They state: “We love pathos as much as humour. We love whimsical patina and raw poetry.” Through this unique expression based on joy and the paradoxes of life, they have composed this one-woman show based on the classic by Lewis Carroll.

As winner of the Best Female Performance at the FETÉN Awards, the European performing arts fair for children in Gijón, Tilde Knudsen performs for the first time at the Festival de Otoño accompanied by a suitcase full of imaginative costumes by British designer Susan Marshall. Usually, costume design is one of the final steps of creating a theatre piece, but not for this performance. Tilde Knudsen shares: “We used the costumes and the geometrical shapes as the starting point from day one and from there we enlivened the figures from the fairy tale. It has been an exciting and divergent working process, which has provided the performance with a strong visual expression.” Based on modular pieces and the simple geometric shapes of circles, triangles and squares, the costumes are just as quirky and changeable as Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. This is a non-verbal artistic collaboration between Danish performer Tilde Knudsen and British costume designer Susan Marshall. The figures from Alice in Wonderland are enlivened with music created by composer Klaus Risager, who with instruments and real sounds has created an atmospheric sound scape alternating between simplicity, savagery, and chaos.

The staging, in keeping with Carroll’s original vision, is a tribute to unreason, fantasy and anarchy. It is the mined stone of beauty from the quarry where only chaos festers. It is the place where the balance between the grotesque and the realistic, between the confusing and the accessible, between the comic and the tragic is tirelessly sought. The Asterions Hus performances are not explanatory, but provocative and suggestive. Tilde’s Alice is more subtle, twisted and even dangerous because she aspires to be transformative. The word-less piece can convey a message beyond borders and nationalities with the universal language of expression. Furthermore, through the language of imagination using a pile of white, square pieces of paper, Tilde Knudsen easily creates figures such as the Rabbit, Queen of Hearts, the Caterpillar and all the weird and wonderful things Alice encounters down the rabbit hole. The adventure enraptures both young and old.

“ Only a few find the way,

some don’t recognise it when they do -

some… don’t ever want to.

How can one run from what’s inside one’s head?”

Cheshire Cat