Why Birds Sing

on programme

This performance doesn't have any called terms at the moment.

duration 1 hour and 30 minutes without interval

premiere

29. September 2016, SNG Nova Gorica

about text

We’d find ourselves in a usual neighbourhood, if it weren’t so unusual – here, someone’s screaming, someone commits suicide, but birds go on singing; relatively-usual unusual people live here: a pensioner, a police officer and his wife, a nurse, a sad heir to his aunt, a merchant with used people and animals, a run-over pedestrian, a med student just shy of graduation, a postman and an actor. They all suffer, scream silently and never speak of it. They’re all above their heads in work, but they’re also above their heads with themselves. In short: we’ll see people who are unusually usual, who are inhumanly human, who are unbelievably similar to us. We will see people sentenced to a horrific memory: they remember themselves in a way they never were. We’ll see a play the way it is: without adornments and mercy, superfluous interpretations or contemporary pathos. It is dangerous to enter this circus, it is impossible to leave it.

The text by Nebojša Pop Tasić, a comedy about sadness, was created bytherequestof the theatre and the director YuliaRoschina; together, they have already created the inspiring performance Madame Bovary which won several awards (Tantadruj Award for acting, Borštnik Award for Directing, Borštnik Award for Young Actor, Stane Sever Award for Acting, SADA Ivy Wreath for dramatic text). The text talks about our human entrapment into the game of life from which we can’t escape, because we’re defined by others, by everything surrounding us, everything above us, everything beneath us. Unfree, we scream and sob, cry and gasp, and we cannot compare, not even from afar, with the birds that sing freely beneath the sky. The text corresponds with several Slovenian drama texts which rather melancholically sketch the dark streets of the human unconscious, but, despite the tear in the the eye, it laughs at everything wholeheartedly.

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