Bestiaire d’amour

The Italian actress and model Isabella Rossellini (1952), famous for the roles she played in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990), visits the Holland Festival this year with a lighthearted

and witty performance, which is part seminar, part stand-up, about the often peculiar love life of animals. Bestiaire d’amour is Rossellini's theatrical version of her online hit Green Porno, a series of funny short films about animals and their sexual habits, which she, an avid nature lover and amateur biologist, conceived, wrote, directed and played in herself. Originally produced on the request of the actor and director Rober Redford to feature at his Sundance Film Festival and subsequently aired on the online Sundance Channel, Green Porno turned out to be a huge success, winning a Webby Award in 2009.

Dressed up in a fantastic array of animal costumes and performing against a brightly coloured paper and paste set (both costumes and set were designed by Jody Shapiro and Rick Gilbert), Rossellini takes the viewer along probing the wonderful mating habits of animals such as the dragonfly, spider, bee, praying mantis, worm, snail and firefly. She underpins her absurdist, understated humour, her animations and visual jokes with scientific fact and she makes the inevitable comparison with the sex life of the strangest animal on earth: man. Rossellini made a number of sequels to the series, focusing in more recent episodes on marine animals, including the series Bon Appetit, which dealt with overfishing and its dramatic effect on the reproduction of sea life. Other Green Porno sequels were the series Seduce Me (2010), in which she examined the strange mating rituals in the animal world, and Mammas (2013), dealing with maternal instincts. With Bestiaire d'amour, Rossellini has translated her shows to the stage, combining a number of these animal themes into a theatrical form.

To create Bestiaire d'amour, Rossellini teamed up with the writer Jean-Claude Carrière and the director Muriel Mayette of the Comédie Française. Dressed completely in black, she delivers a theatrical seminar dealing with the love games of spiders, dolphins, insects, hamsters and other animals right down to their outlandish and surreal details. She discusses all manner of lust, orgies, fights, killings of partners and babies, rape, the most incredible mating rituals and acrobatic sex positions as well as moments of great intimacy and tenderness. 'The butterfly can sense his or her lover from a mile away,' says Rossellini, 'whereas people can sometimes be blind to each other from a few feet.'

Rossellini's performance is supported by six or seven video excerpts from Green Porno, illustrating her story dressed as a fly, a duck, a squid or an insect. Initially intended to be a one-off show, Bestiaire d'amour premiered in June 2013 at the festival Printemps de Comédie in the French city of Montpellier. However, it proved such a huge success, that the show embarked on a world wide tour, visiting France, the United States, England and Australia; with the Holland Festival having the Dutch premiere.