Annihilation

Thomas Ryckewaert

theatre

“If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.” – from Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

In Annihilation, a biologist joins an expedition into Area X, a forbidden zone where nature has reclaimed the land and previous expeditions ended in disappearance, madness, or suicide. She is the only one of her party who will return.

Reemerged and in quarantine, she is interrogated by an anonymous authority attempting to reconstruct what happened. But this person who has returned from Area X is different from the one who was sent in.

Thomas Ryckewaert and performer Ika Schwander adapt Jeff VanderMeer’s cult novel Annihilation for theatre–reimagining a universe where horror, science fiction, and ecology converge. Field journal fragments, interrogation, scientific observations, and flashbacks form a labyrinth in which the boundary between observer and observed becomes fluid.

Annihilation is climate fiction for the stage. A performance about the moment when nature looks back.

• Thomas Ryckewaert (1979, he/him) is an author, director and performer. He studied biology at KU Leuven and drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. His work develops a visual and immersive theatrical language moving between science and horror, between the Bible and science fiction pulp. It is driven by a fascination with forms of scale and intelligence that challenge our imagination – from microbes to AI, from black holes to vampires.

• Ika Schwander (1999, she/they) is a French-Dutch artist, director, and performer working across film, performance, installation, and drawing. Her practice blends fiction, non-fiction, digital mythologies, and themes of illness and healing to explore the contradictions, pressures, and transformations experienced by a body in crisis. 