Ultima Vez: Infamous Offspring
Directed and Choreographed by Wim Vandekeybus; Created With And Performed By: Iona Kewney, Maria Zhi Tortosa Soriano, Lotta Sandborgh, Cola Ho Lok Yee, Samuel Planas, Rakesh Sukesh, Paola Taddeo, Adrian Thömmes, Hakim Abdou Mlanao and Tijen Lawton; Text: Fiona Benson; Music: Warren Ellis/DIrty Three and ILA
NYU Skirball | 566 LaGuardia Pl, New York, NY 10012
November 13 - November 15, 2025
Photo Credits: 20 infamous offspring by flavia; Wim Vandekeybus
In Wim Vandekeybus’s latest cosmological fever dream, the stage becomes nothing less than a teeming genealogical battlefield—a blended brood of sibling gods and demi-gods, unruly scions of Zeus’s famously expansive appetites, all observed from the empyrean heights by the paterfamilias himself and by Hera, his long-suffering, long-seething consort. From their celestial vantage, projected onto a monumental screen that hovers over the action like the lid of an Olympian jewel box, the divine parents preside with an uneasy cocktail of hauteur, regret, and a distinctly modern marital malaise. Hera, in particular, is drawn with exquisite bitterness: a goddess whose immortal jealousy has calcified into something more plaintive, a yearning for the lost tenderness of her early days with Zeus, before the infidelities multiplied like errant stars across the night sky.
In Infamous Offspring, the stage becomes a volatile celestial nursery, populated by a brood of god-siblings whose rivalries make even the most operatic human family squabbles seem quaint. Here, the divine progeny parade, clash, connive, and collapse into one another with the casual ferocity of immortals accustomed to having both the universe and their tempers at their disposal. Meanwhile, their errant parents—Zeus and Hera, rendered with imperial weariness and caustic authority by British actors Daniel Copeland and Lucy Black—do not descend from Olympus but instead loom from their screen suspended above the action. This elevated plane, a clever and visually striking deployment of onstage projection, becomes both throne room and surveillance chamber, a reminder that the gods’ distance from their children is as emotional as it is spatial.
The offspring themselves taunt, betray, and spar with a frenzied intimacy recognizable to anyone who has endured the labyrinthine politics of siblinghood. Yet their quarrels, magnified by divinity, ripple outward with cataclysmic consequences—mythic tantrums leaving scorched earth, battered hearts, or entire cosmologies trembling. In this realm, a single spat doubles as an existential crisis, and a moment of affection threatens to reorder the very heavens.
What anchors this sprawling, unsettling epic is the extraordinary ensemble Vandekeybus has marshaled. Each performer is a distinct force—physically, emotionally, stylistically—but all radiate with equal magnetism. Together they form a constellation of embodied contradictions: feral yet vulnerable, grotesque yet sublime, united only in their ability to command the eye and unsettle the mind. It is this fiercely committed cast that transforms Infamous Offspring from a mythological pageant into a living, breathing cosmic psychodrama, one whose echoes linger long after the final divine blow has been struck.
Below this imperious diorama, the progeny themselves—Dionysus, Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, and their richly complicated siblings—writhe, agonize, and plot in a dance-driven struggle for admission to the rarefied stratum of the ruling gods. Dionysus’s voluptuous unruliness, Aphrodite’s ambivalent radiance, Ares’s swaggering destructiveness, Apollo’s pure-lined severity: each deity is rendered through the kinetic language of nine dancers whose international backgrounds yield a choreographic polyglot that is both hypnotic and fractious. Their physicalities, sometimes eerily synchronized, sometimes collapsing into unruly chaos, mimic the very temperament of the divine siblings—alternately united in rebellion against their distant parents, then instantly scheming to curry favor from either mother or father, that they might ascend to full divinity.
Hovering between heaven and earth is Hephaestus who may at first appear the antithesis of Hera—stripped of regality—an immortal son discarded like an inconvenient truth, bent almost double by the burdens of his malformed body, frequently navigating the stage on his hands like some wounded yet resolute creature—he emerges, paradoxically, as the production’s deepest reservoir of feeling. His speech comes haltingly, as though each word were being forged in the very furnace of his chest, yet from this broken instrument Vandekeybus extracts a startling range of emotional timbres. In Kewney’s rendering, Hephaestus becomes a kind of living palimpsest of the human condition: vulnerability etched atop resilience, longing crosshatched with shame, and beneath it all a quiet, devastating dignity. Kewney’s performance, a study in tensile grace, transforms the god of craftsmanship and fire into both messenger and outcast.
A painter as well as an extraordinary contortionist, Kewney expands the lexicon of theatrical expression by giving Hephaestus arresting poignancy, not merely a voice or a body, but an additional visual language—those stark, urgent drawings scrawled onstage as the action unfolds. These images function like ruptures in the mythic continuum, jagged missives from a god who has been both discarded and forgotten. Through them, Kewney compels us to attend to this fallen figure with an intimacy that borders on reverence. By the end, we do not simply sympathize with Hephaestus; we ache for him, recognizing in his twisted form and yearning gestures the most fragile, neglected contours of our own humanity.
Fiona Benson—whose poetry has long shimmered with a chiaroscuro intensity, her dark imaginings tempered by a lyricism that feels almost ritualistic—steps into the theatrical arena with Infamous Offspring, offering a text that feels less written than conjured. In her reanimation of the old mythologies, Benson does not merely retell; she excavates, unearths, and reorients, applying her poet’s instinct for compression and resonance to material that has too often ossified under the weight of its own grandeur. This marks her first foray into theatre, though one is tempted to say she has been writing for the stage all along. Poetry, after all—like dance—is an art form predicated on the unsaid, on gesture and suggestion, on meaning that glimmers at the periphery rather than declaring itself outright. In Benson’s hands, language becomes an atmospheric force: an incantation that hovers over the choreography rather than dictating it, a lattice of images and intimations through which the dancers move like figures inside a living poem.
The dramaturgy is equally capacious, touching on the objectification and sexualization endured by Aphrodite; on Zeus’s shape-shifting assault upon the innocent Callisto; on the fragile bravado of Dionysus; and on Ares’s clenched aggression, which reveals its own bruised underlayer. No character is exalted above the others—each is rendered with a Homeric balance of virtue and vice, dancing to rhythms that feel both ancient and startlingly modern. Presiding over all is Tiresias, the blind prophet, a silver-painted Israel Galván, whose image flickers intermittently on the screen, an intermediary whose drumbeats tether the dancers to something older and darker than parental neglect.
Vandekeybus, that tireless stylistic alchemist, has marshaled his familiar arsenal—cinema, spoken word, dance, and a bespoke, throbbing musical score from Warren Ellis and the Dirty Three (with ILA’s haunted vocals threading through the soundscape). The effect is a sensorial overload, a deliberate challenge to the viewer’s hierarchy of attention. Should we attend to the cinematic gaze of the gods above, whose immobility suggests a disquieting omniscience? Or should our eyes remain on the mortal-ish demi-gods below, whose lusts, tantrums, cruelties, and occasional tenderness feel distressingly familiar? Vandekeybus’s point is precisely this impossibility of singular focus.
Is there, perhaps, too much here? Inevitably. One needs not merely a passing familiarity with Greek mythology but a working fluency in its genealogies to fully parse every symbolic gesture. And yet, even for the uninitiated, there is the sheer pleasure of the movement vocabulary: fluid yet jagged, organic yet robotic, its contradictions merging into a cohesive whole that speaks more clearly than any didactic explanation could.
There are moments of indulgence—sections where one senses the music dictating the dramaturgical length rather than the other way around—and the multiplicity of visual stimuli can feel like both gift and burden. Still, the ensemble’s multinational, multi-racial tapestry yields a dynamic range of movement that rarely lags, and Vandekeybus’s signature melding of mediums serves the myth surprisingly well. By reframing these ancient tales as the saga of a dysfunctional blended family ruled by two profoundly self-absorbed parents, he thrusts the old stories into the charged atmosphere of contemporary familial and societal fracture.
Yes, it is a great deal to absorb. But it rewards the effort. Amid the clamor of gods and their grievances, Vandekeybus offers a mythic fresco for our uneasy age—messy, mercurial, and, in its own ravaged way, transcendent.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 23, 2025 All rights reserved.