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Sea of Birds begins while the lights are still up and the audience is filing in. A voice slowly becomes audible. She is remembering what it was like to live someplace far away a long time ago, something about it always being green, and how the cattle in the pasture were so quiet and seemed to be whispering, how no one ever seemed to talk to her. The lights go down, an eerie, minimal score begins to play, and shadows of birds appear, projected on a large paper screen that separates us from the set.
Sea of Birds is not conventional theater, meaning you won’t get actors who have memorized their lines to present a plot with conflict and resolution. The piece is about something different. Or maybe about is the wrong word to use. Indeed, we the audience struggled with it. During the Q&A that followed several people asked what certain elements of the performance were meant to symbolize. The director Sebastienne Mundheim answered by handing the question back to the audience: “What did it mean for you?”
In the beginning of the performance, when the director, who also acts as a kind of narrator, tells us about being young and listening to her mother’s stories. She says something cryptic like “these are my mothers words, these are my words” and “stories are a way to remember, stories are also a way of forgetting”. To an extent, the content of Sea of Birds is not a story of World War II Latvia but rather memory and story telling themselves.
Munheim has created a beautiful piece that incorporates music, dance and sculpture. The fantastic and dreamlike qualities refer to the childhood imagination that initially received these stories, and the way the imagination figures in to the representation of the past. I brought along a friend of mine to the show who knows a lot about performance art, experimental theater and puppetry (I like a thoughtful and informed companion to help me think about what I’m seeing). She was better able to put into words what it was about Sea of Birds that makes it unique. She talked about theatrical representations that keep interpretation open. The action isn’t limited to one place or one time. The conflict isn’t even limited to particular circumstances. As such, it can reach a wider audience. It becomes less about relating an event or illustrating a moral and more about imagination. Mundheim is not being a smart ass when she hands the question back to the audience (What does it mean for you?), nor is she exactly advocating that facile stance regarding art that is so rife today (It can mean whatever you want!). Rather she is foregrounding her own creative process, and she is engaging the audience and inviting them to be part of that process.
Sea of Birds played at Theater Project as part of QuestFest 2010, a visual theater festival. Most of the shows that make up this festival will play down at Gallaudet University, but three are playing up here, in Baltimore, at Theater Project and Creative Alliance. QuestFest 2010 is focused on transparency and accessibility, and most of the works in this festival are works-in-progress. The website takes time to explain what visual theater is. Every performance during QuestFest 2010 will be followed by a discussion where the audience and the performers can talk about what happened and what didn’t.
Sea of Birds
Sebastienne Mundheim
Baltimore Theater Project
45 W. Preston Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
410 752 8558
http://www.theatreproject.org
February 4th, 5th and 6th @ 8 pm
(Unfortunately the final shows were cancelled due to weather—ED)
Tags: Baltimore Theater Project, QuestFest 2010, Sea of Birds, Sebastienne Mundheim., visual theater
Filed Under: Feature Sights
[...] Original post: Radar Redux » Sea of Birds during a Baltimore Theater Project [...]
February 22, 2010 11:20 am