Det bor inga duvor här längre ett fågelhjärtas berättelse

[There are no pigeons living here anymore (a story of a bird’s heart)]

The work is an auto-fiction that draws its material from events in the early 70s in a Swedish suburb. The audience gets access to two parallel descriptions where there is a difference of 45 years between the narrator self. The title refers to the incident where a family gathered to save an injured pigeon.

The staging is a home that has been closed to the eyes of the outside world and inside its walls a spiral of violence is raging where abuse is an everyday occurrence while apple trees are pruned and gooseberries ripen. The family’s everyday needs and activities cut sharply against the conflicts within the home’s four walls and a complex love story.

The design is performed in a fragmented and partly authentic scenography where the audience steps into the scenes’ environments, ie ‘the home’. Choreography, sound, light, video and objects together create so-called ‘immersive performance’ (enveloping performance). The work has been prepared under the script supervision of Petra Revenue in the autumn of 2020.

Background:
“Domestic violence is a taboo and shameful subject often characterized by a culture of silence. When I scratch the surface, the stories never end. Many voices want to tell. An everyday life with abuse is easily normalized and the outside world prefers to look away than intervene. During the process, a story about love between two individuals has also emerged. Two individuals who in their own way fought for the right to love and be loved. Therefore, the title was developed with the subtitle ‘a story of a bird’s heart”. – Benedikte Esperi 2020.