Planetary history unfolds without words

At this year's Aranya Theatre Festival in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, theater collective Plankton from the Netherlands presented A Mountain Running Past (Er rent been berg voorbij), a wordless visual theater piece that compresses Earth's 4.54 billion years of history into a 60-minute performance.

The show features a large cardboard stage set — rivers, mountains, clouds, and forests — through which performers construct a flowing panorama: continents drift, oceans rise, ecosystems emerge and fade. Accompanied by a four-part natural soundscape, from cracking rocks to birdsong, the piece invites audiences to experience time on a "planetary scale" — from the birth of the moon to the rise and fall of humanity.

Created and directed by Plankton founders Sonja van Ojen and Hendrik Kegels, the work challenges the human-centric perspective of traditional theater.

"We try to make something where humans are not the main character," Kegels said, "because theater in our experience is mostly about humans, played by humans, for humans. We should try to put ourselves out of the center of it all."

The result is a visually striking and deeply poetic meditation on humanity's place within the vast sweep of Earth's history.