JOHAN PETRI

An original play that takes off from the book The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow (2021).

​

The production is a performing arts project for two actors, two talking puppets and a musician. It is a
multimedia performance populated by people trying to imagine how they can reinvent themselves. They ask themselves, and each other, how they can think and act to loosen the hard conceptual shackles that bind the world into what it is supposed to be.

 

​Text: Lily Toback

Music: Hans Otte, Peter Hansen and Kristine Scholz

Concept and Direction: Johan Petri

Dollmaker, set design: Dana Johnson

Dollmaker: Vanja Sandell Billström

Video filming/editing: Lucien Easton

Dramaturgue: Tora von Platen

Sound and Light design: Emil Olsson

Assistant Director: Milton Jordansson Pinto

​

Actors: Monica Stenbeck and Eli Frankel

Musician: Kristine Scholz

Produced by Alice Collective for Sound&Stage Art​

Premiere October 2025 at Theatre Giljotin, Stockholm

​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In their book, Graeber and Wengrow question the European Enlightenment as normative not only for the modern state and the forming of democracy, but also as an epistemological paradigm. Their research and description of how human life and social communities have been shaped throughout history shifts the focus away from European thinkers to other cultures and traditions (especially North American Indians) but also away from the idea of thinking - and thinkers - as something decoupled from the movements of nature, from social formations and from the influence of myths. The European Enlightenment established the view that human social, cultural and economic development over millennia had gradually moved from small-scale and primitive to advanced and socially and economically large-scale.​ Eighteenth-century European thinkers also considered it clear that humans have an innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement, and that inequality was inevitable. This inequality was seen as a key driver of social and economic development and a key component of the social and economic hierarchies that were considered necessary for a stable society.
      The central and crucial point of Graeber's and Wengrow's critique is that this established - and still dominant - view of how humans have organized their societies throughout history is not correct, seen in the light of new research and new historical facts. They highlight examples and facts of how humans - in different periods of history and in different places on earth - have shaped societies, cultures and languages where social and economic dynamics have not been characterized by inequality and hierarchies have not been inevitable. The authors' illumination shapes - to say the least - a new narrative that not only points backwards, but challenges the established and dominant image of how we today fantasize, build and plan for the future.

​

​