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TO DIE INTO A BIRD
FILM (30min), Work -in-Progress
Written and Directed Anna Kushnerova Earthly Folk
Hilary Kneale, Miguel Valentini, Sofia Kovarich,
Dan Faberoff, Lies Van Hee, Bodhi, Tim Russell
The Corpse Elise Gettliffe Serafins Ken Mai, Romain Brau, Jamus Wood, David Lautier, Jasper Salomonsz, Miguel Valentini Sycamore Guardian Tim Russell
Costume Design Anna Kushnerova Costume Design Assistance Lena Morien Woven Coffin Eamonn Harnett Sound Design Anastasia Freygang On Set Assistance Becca Parkinson
Camera Raul Bartolome Camera Ben Jeans Houghton Edit Anna Kushnerova
To Die into A Bird is a Fairy tale, it is a crossing into the world of animal spirit, the spirit of plants, rocks and the all living cosmos.
Amongst the ancient forests of Dartmoor, amongst stunted oaks and gelatinous fungal kingdoms, where moss grows like deep-pile carpet, dwells a spirit of a Bird, a Bird that eats Human forms….
Some of the story was told long ago by the people of the Moors, they spoke of the passages of their ancestors into the after-worlds, and of how their bodies were carried in salt along the coffin roads that lay in fern valleys over the granite veins….
This tale is also a whispering of wind and streams, an invitation to descend into the sacred oak groves, to shape shift, to decompose into the canopies of string-of-sausages lichens, tree lungwort and witches whiskers; to play within the delicate cycles of creation and destruction.
We celebrate the brittle body & Death as a Sanctuary where we lose shape, where we compost. In trespassing our human structures into a world of spirits, shredding dominant stories of identity, we reclaim our journey of transformation; staying with indeterminacy, we find mythical kinship between humans, nature, and cosmos.
The story takes us to the death ritual of a being Elise, the daughter of the great ancient beings, the trees, the rocks, the rivers and of the -beyond human lineages.
Through the elements of Water, Fire, Ether & Earth, in dreamlike magical undercurrents we enter animal and plant spirit Dreaming, into the time after Death.
Surrounded by a procession of earthly Folk and chimera like beings, a beautifully metamorphosing Corpse journeys into the after-under yonder beyond. The destabilisation of form is echoed in the changing colours of her body and morphing of the face, limbs, nails and hair of the Dead Elise along the path. At the thresholds of kingdoms, her contours are reinvented into bear, lizard, butterfly…
At gradual disentanglement of the living and the deceased the mourners pass Elise across the river where she is received on an island, a forgotten plateau, exuberant with flora where generations of bryophytes live and die on coiled branches of a sycamore tree. She is received by the Sycamore Guardian and Dreamer who holds the Sycamore Key to the otherworld. His eyebrows hanging down over his glimmering eyes, the mossy creature is ingrown into the roots of the underworld.
As she travels further into the realm of water, her bodily territory is elongated and entwined with silt, reeds and water mosses. Her hands, body, nose becomes amphibious organisms, freshwater algae & wicker coffin turns to cocoon of a small heath butterfly, filmy ferns spread out of her toes, long tongue holds a pebble….
River phantoms who feed on night and water, the Serafins - custodians of the stream, harlequins, one footed human- one- footed- bird- servants with ears of Jelly Fungus, carry Elise across the viscose water into the misty forest kingdom, where the bird of prey, bird of paradise is suspended in its nest on the Mother of Trees….
We are atmospheric beings not just contained flesh, we are spread out beings
Participants in an ecosystem of feeling.
We are more than our bodies we are exceeding ourselves. (Bayo Akomolafe)
The performers are versed in Butoh (liminal theatre dance) and are experienced in partnerships to the concealed, to the mystic and mysterious cosmos that is beyond our perception.
In performance we spend time in Dartmoor National Park listening to the offerings with a reverential imagination with care and curiosity for its landscapes, the voices of non-beings an beings of its temperate rainforests.
*Special care is placed on sculpting costumes out of biotic materials such fallen tree matter, soil, clay, grasses wax and willow.