Show Credits
Director and Choreographer: James Kudelka
Performers: Laurence Lemieux, Alexander Dobson, Korin Thomas-Smith
Original music: James Rolfe
Libretto: Alex Poch-Goldin
Piano: Steven Philcox
Violin: Parmela Attariwala
Cello: Carina Reeves
Lighting Designer: Simon Rossiter
Costume Designer: Jim Searle & Chris Tyrell/Hoax Couture
Projection Designer: Jeremy Mimnagh
Set Designer: Joe Pagnan
Puppet Designer/Builder: Nell Coleman
Rehearsal Assistant: Danielle Baskerville
Premiered May 2016 at The Citadel, Toronto, ON.
Presented by Compagnie de la Citadelle
About the Show
Against Nature
Directed and Choreographed by James Kudelka
The guidebook of decadence. James Kudelka’s music/dance theatrical, adapts author Joris-Karl Huysman’s scandalous 1884 novel of bourgeois excess, and aesthetic contemplation. The story of Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, recluse who loathes 19th-century Parisian society and retreats into an obsessive, artistic, and indulgent world of his own creation that ravages his mind and body. Featuring original music by James Rolfe, and libretto by Alex Poch-Goldin.
Against Nature was nominated for a 2016 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Production
“It all makes for an intense theatrical experience in which conventions of dance, opera and theatre are not so much abandoned as reshaped and combined to evoke the central theme of a man in search of himself, yet unwilling to trust in any God… Against Nature is a must-see.”
– Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star
