With Eating a Man, Composer Christian Winther Christensen and stage director Anna Berit Asp Christensen have embarked on a musical and personal voyage exploring the concept of the unknown and the alien. The investigation has its starting point in Winther Christensen’s ten-year-old mocumentary-work Documentation about Apu Sakar, wherein Winther Christensen agrees to eat an Indian man after his death. The purpose of the ritual is to honour the deceased by letting his spirit live on through the consumption. 

Now, ten years later, the work has been reimagined by Scenatet and new questions have emerged: questions concerning the symbolic meaning of cannibalism, the possibility of honorable cultural exchange, and the nature of the experience of alienation. Eating a Man does not give any definitive answers but allows the audience not only to answer these uncomfortable questions for themselves, but also to interrogate the root of this uncomfortability. 

Eating a Man is a performance opera commissioned and produced by Scenatet with support from November Music, SPOR festival, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The work was premiered at SPOR festival September 2021 and will tour to November Music November 2023, and HCMF, November 2024.

“Christensen’s music teases the attention rather than demanding it in a big forte fortissimo. Similarly, it was also clear that something important is at stake in Eating a Man. But it was liberatingly unclear whether the gaze is directed at Christensen himself as a form of cathartic self-insight or at a prejudiced and xenophobic outside world”.

Performers: My Hellgren (vlc), Vicky Wright (cl), Rowland Sutherland (fl), Matias Seibæk (perc), Fei Nie (pno), Kasia Ziminska (vio), Clara Stengaard Hansen (voc)
Composer: Christian Winther Christensen
Staging and direction: Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Video: Christian Winther Christensen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Light design: Maria Pi Houmann
Technical Manager: Mette Hornbek Hansen
Performance images: Marc Fluri

The Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Sounds Now, The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, KODA Cultur and William Demant Fonden.