Name: Songs of the Fools
Start: 2026-03-25CET20:00:00+0100
Location: Kortrijk - Antigone

Date	25 March - 27 March
Location	Kortrijk - Antigone

Language: English

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The poetic universe of Oxana Sankova is often inhabited by figures on the fringes — stuck between the tiles in the pavement, drifting between reality and fiction. She draws inspiration from both personal experiences and literature, from her native Russia as well as the broader world. For this production she was inspired by those who chose weakness as a form of resistance,like the “alcohologist” Venichka in Jerofeyev’s Moscow-Petushki, or the seemingly self-destructive characters of Platonov.

What happens when someone deliberately weakens themselves — physically and mentally—perhaps by consuming vast amounts of alcohol? Will they lose all solid ground beneath their feet, become as indifferent as the world itself? Or might this detachment lift them, carry them beyond themselves, and reveal a vulnerability that allows them to open themselves up to the world? If their weakness becomes a form of strength, is it weakness still? Does the world even care? And what to do with all these empty bottles?

From childhood, we are raised to believe we have to be strong. That we must fight for our place under the sun. If we neglect to fight, life will devour us. Then we have lost. We fear this, falling behind, hitting rock bottom.

One day, I came across these words in the Taoist text Tao Te Ching:

‘When a person is born, they are soft and weak; when they die, they are hard and rigid. All hard and rigid things are companions of death. All soft and flexible things are expressions of life. Therefore, what has hardened will not win.’

Those words struck me — beautiful and frightening at once. What would happen if you truly tried to live by them?
—Oxana Sankova