Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk ingeniously brings to life a Polish village where residents try to survive the effects of two world wars, communism, and the advent of modernity. Several generations of villagers start families, build houses, and try to resist the violence of history and nature as best they can. Birth, growth, decay, and death affect all creatures - trees, spirits, and animals in addition to humans - and are described with compassion and gentleness. Tokarczuk shows that every human being is completely unique, searching for meaning and purpose.

Guy Cassiers, together with Hotel Modern and 11 actors from the ensemble, creates the world of Primeval and Other Times: in models and live on several video screens, life in the village and the surrounding nature is created. The whole is a tableau vivant of epic proportions that does justice to the layered world of the novel.

GUY CASSIERS ABOUT PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES

'From a small Polish village, we follow the important events that shaped Europe in the 20th century. In a tender and disarming way, Olga Tokarczuk shows a swarm of voices searching for higher meanings in their harsh existence. The characters form a close-knit community but are driven apart by a violent history.

Tokarczuk sketches the world as a living, ceaselessly changing entity before our eyes, of which humans are a small but at the same time powerful part. Thus, in an almost fairy-tale manner, she makes us look afresh, through the eyes of some 20 villagers, at our current situation and our responsibility in it as human beings.'