Centre for Contemporary Performing Arts

On November 5, 2015 in the mountains of the Brazilian region of Minas Gerais, a dam containing toxic mining waste broke. The devastating mud flood buried several villages before it poured into the 400-mile Rio Doce river. The catastrophe brought the region where at least three out of every four people worked in the mining industry into the state of a tabula rasa. Silke Huysmans grew up in Minas Gerais, a few miles from the site of the catastrophe. Twenty years later, she returned to Brazil with Hannes Dereere to talk to the people affected by the incident. In Europe, the two artists expanded their perspective on the event through more interviews: Paul De Grauwee, an economist, and Luce Crevits, a neurologist. The witnesses of the event tell the story of the catastrophe from their own point of view, with their own nuance, while emphasizing the aspects which were crucial to them. The documentary theater performance entitled Mining Stories is neither a detective mystery nor a reconstruction of a catastrophe. It is a journey through a diverse palette of personal stories which touch on such themes as memory, politics, religion and storytelling.