feedback and comments

This is what the arms dealers want .. to export death all over the world

hi Jonathan, hi Anna!
I worked as a translator during the International Blacksea Theatre Festival.
I was really fascinated by your energy and love for drama,
I was only a translator but I definitely loved your style,
I enjoyed the workshops, actually everybody did.
I really hope to see you again next year, I know the participants loved your style and really looked for learning some useful things.
you are GREAT!!!

Handan ?LYAS

People often need a mythical story that will give their sacrifice a meaning.

Also people who are in some way prepared for traumatic events can deal with trauma more effectively. There were three brothers who had between them lost eleven members of their family. When I met these brothers in Albania after the evacuation I was shocked by their vital capability, by the life force they embodied.

Comment by psychiatrist and theatre director in Kosova.

There is something interesting going on with the mourners. Firstly there is the central importance of a community to narrate a death and thereby give a life meaning. A wake is about telling stories. The dead person is eulogised and praised to the point of hyperbole, and a voice of realism or even of dissent is impossible once that person is dead. This is incredibly constricting for the survivor.

Anna Schmitz, Az Theatre

There is a tradition in Albanian culture which says that crying is good neither for the living nor the dead. This repression of feeling can create an outward strength but an inner collapse.

There is a custom whereby old women are often employed as mourners.
Comment by Agim Selimi.

What I feel I am continually butting my head against is this great void in the middle of the play, the unspoken experience of Alcestis. I have been thinking about this in terms of a survivor's relationship to trauma and death. If the central event is the trauma then by virtue of their status as survivor a person is peripheral, it did not happen to them. In this sense we are coming up against something that is un-narratable, un-playable. The true end is absolute and puts an end to our representational capacity. Is this true?

I am worried about the resounding silence at the end of the play: Alcestis doesn’t speak.

Anna Schmitz, Az Theatre

Hello, Jonathan:

ariel

Comment from Ariel Dorfman

Creating the voice around the missing shape of somebody else's body was extraordinary. I absolutely loved this and found it ‘freeing’ and deeply interesting- it evoked, for me, the sensation of keening. The sound that emerged was instinctual and not pre-conceived and a different sound sometimes came out depending on who had just been there and what part of the body they had been holding onto. And I found then when somebody replaced the missing body with their own- my sound changed. The images created with everyone doing this exercise was gorgeous.

Louise Burns, Az Theatre

Another image of survival and recovery is singing. We know of a number of stories where people have managed to stay alive by singing. These are shipwreck stories or mountain rescue stories. Singing connects up the three vital centres of consciousness: the head, the heart and the guts and so it connects up our energetic systems. We have done a bit of work on this in the workshops.

After Admetos returns from Alcestis' funeral he cannot go into his house. He is so powerfully reminded of the time when he brought his newly married wife back to his home and now he breaks down. He is unable to speak words and for some time he can only utter a series of sounds to express his pain. It turns out that ancient Greek is very rich in different sounds which express very precisely various forms of pain. These are generally translated into 'Alas' . The sounds constitute a kind of song in the sense that the music of song lifts the words to the level of sheer sound.

This relation of sound to physical and emotional feeling is a universal factor. The baby's cry and the human scream and the human cry of joy know no frontiers.

Jonathan Chadwick, Az Theatre

There is a tradition in Albanian culture which says that crying is good neither for the living nor the dead. This repression of feeling can create an outward strength but an inner collapse.

There is a custom whereby old women are often employed as mourners.

Comment by Agim Selimi.