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The newest, large-scale project The Carnival of the Animals collects a series of modular performance works following the 14-movement structure of Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1886 musical suite for children.

1. Introduction and Royal March of the Lion
2. Hens and Roosters
3. Wild Donkeys Swift Animals
4. Tortoises
5. The Elephant
6. Kangaroos
7. Aquarium
8. Characters with Long Ears
9. The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods
10. Aviary
11. Pianists
12. Fossils
13. The Swan
14. Finale

The Every house Carnival considers endangered and extinct species, with an original performance devised in response to each of Saint-Saëns’s titles, following those imaginative classifications. With sections of varying durations, media, and casting, Finnish artist Essi Kausalainen’s handmade costumes provide the visual/material common vocabulary, facilitating the celebratory transformation of human into hybrid entity. The intricacies of non-human life provide the foundation. Development of the first performances began in Autumn 2018 with Royal March of the Lion and Aquarium.

As a way of introducing the project, Every house made the short film below, commissioned by and premiered at Animals of Manchester (including HUMANZ), an interactive Live Art experience created by Hamburg-based artist Sibylle Peters (Theatre of Research) and London’s Live Art Development Agency (LADA) which poses questions about the relationship between humans and other animals, Manchester International Festival.

This 4-minute film animates and narrates a photograph Marcelin Flandrin took from an airplane over the Atlas Mountains in the Maghreb on a flight from Casablanca, Morocco to Dakar, Senegal in 1925. It gives us the last visual record of a wild North Africa ‘Barbary’ lion, hunted in the 20th century to extinction.

Development of the live works was indefinitely postponed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic but work continues on the projects with hopes to return to performing for assembled live audiences in 2022.