"After The Birds", a play co-produced by Chorea and Earthfall theatre companies is presented at Moscow's Meyerhold Centre, on 19th / 20th December. The showings are followed by a master class in acting and a meeting with the Russian audience.
"Po Ptakach" / "After the Birds" is the second part of a triptych created by CHOREA and Earthfall theatre companies. It is the result of an international project which was initiated in Cardiff (Wales) in December 2005. Using two absolutely different aesthetics and working methods, the two groups jointly created a brand new language on the border of genres and styles. Their plays confront ancient Greek choral songs with modern music, urban space choreography and fears of the modern world.
"After The Birds" attempts to answer what is left of Aristophanes’ play The Birds, and what is left of the ancient Greeks and their culture. It must be remembered that in Aristophanes’ times, the city of Athens went through devastating wars with Sparta, collapsing democracy, political crises, plots and power struggles among different political factions. Social and religious values started to crumble. In such circumstances, there always appear some guides to a brave new world which may be created on the ruins of the old one, thanks to utopian ideas, populist slogans, manipulation and operating exactly between the ones who succeeded and the ones who lost. But from behind the tall walls, gods look like corrupted idiots, and people look like dwarfs deprived of dreams. Can a paradise on Earth be built only behind barbed-wire fences; do all world healing visions become equally bitter and dangerous when we start putting them into practice?
“As soon as you enter the performance space, they are there. Figures swoop on you, chattering in a language you don't understand, guiding you to a seat. You feel pecked at, part of a gang you didn't know you had signed up to. You have unwittingly become part of the flock.
A second collaboration between Cardiff-based Earthfall and Polish company Theatre Association Chorea, this is an imaginative, radical reworking of Aristophanes' comedy The Birds, in dance, physical theatre and song.
Ostensibly it is about a group of rebels who attempt to create a new, uncorrupted society halfway between humans and gods. But what works best is the portrayal of group psychology: how outsiders are regarded, how we remove ourselves from the flock and then want more than anything to be part of it again.”
Elisabeth Mahoney,
The Guardian (9th of November 2007):
“The axis of the piece is not the nostalgia after the Greek “Golden Age” but an attempt to carry out the dream that people have dreamt for centuries – the dream of a New Beginning – an island, a country, a city – free from violence and deceit.”
Dariusz Kosiński, PhD published "Clouds", Konteksty magazine, spring 2006
The performance is shown twice on the 19th and 20th of December. The
master class entitled "Alphabet of the stage" and a meeting with the audience takes place on the 20th of December.
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