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Stan’s Cafe: Of All The People In All The World

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  • Stan’s Cafe: Of All The People In All The World

    • Presented by Stan's Cafe

    In a beautifully simple performance, Stan's Cafe take abstract statistics and one tonne of rice to create a powerful, witty, politically engaging and humane work of art.

    For this beautifully simple performance Stan’s Cafe are bringing 1 tonne of rice to Gulbenkian, a grain for everyone in the country. Over the course of five days, a vast array of human statistics will be carefully weighed out in rice and arranged beside each other in labelled piles.

    As an audience member, you can drop in and see how the installation develops through the week, and you can interact with the performer as the weigh out and develop the piece.

    By doing no more than making abstract statistics tangible and placing them in careful relation to each other, Stan’s Cafe create a powerful work of art. It is politically engaged, subtly witty, diverting, shocking, humane and ultimately, deeply moving.

    Stan’s Cafe is a theatre company based in Birmingham whose witty and provocative work has been cropping up in unusual settings since 1991. All the People in All The World is one of their most successful productions, and has toured the world since it inception in. they describe it like this:

    “The show adapts to its setting: the country, city and building it is in. The amount of rice used varies according to which version is performed. It started in 2003 with Of All The People In All The World: UK using 1,000Kg of rice to represent the country’s 60 million population. Medium size shows may use 12,000Kg as in Of All The People In All The World: Europe. There have been two presentations of the definitive Of All The People In All The World in which the whole world’s population is represented. First in Stuttgart in 2005 with 104 tons and subsequently in Birmingham in 2008 with 112 tons. Staging the same version in 2022 would require 133 tons – fortunately we still perform small versions.”

    Join us to see how this version of the show plays out across their time with us. The installation is open between 1 and 7pm each day so feel free to join us on a lunch break, before an evening film/performance, or for some thoughtful, peaceful time on an afternoon.

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