Once There Was A Beautiful Kingdom

In rethinking our history, we are not just looking at the past but at the present, and trying to look at it from the point of view of those who have been left out of the benefits of so-called civilization. It is a simple but profoundly important thing we are trying to accomplish, to look at the world from other points of view. We need to do that, as we come into the next century, if we want this coming century to be different, if we want it to be not an American century, or a Western century, or a white century, or a male century, or any nation’s, any group’s century, but a century for the human race.

::Howard Zinn::

This week’s FoS was very much a theatre of the radical, breeding a mood that compelled a journey to the root of our perspectives and behaviours. A demand to re-evaluate the sense of exceptionalism of our brother to the south and ourselves.

Rapper, playwright, and activist Belladonna fervidly lifted away the thin soap-scorched skin veiling the discontent widely present in our nation.

Her poetry: layered yet simple. Belladonna twisted the often comforting nationalistic and capitalistic mythos, old and modern, with ease, sliding the perspective to those that have traditionally (and presently) not benefited from such underlying systems of belief.

One of the most pernicious and destructive modes of reasoning in our society today is that ‘if you work hard, you will become rich’. The meaning of that being, if you are poor, it is because you haven’t worked hard enough. Belladonna paints, with a frightening familiarity many of us can recognize, the effects of such dogma on a human mind.

Little can be said that will do justice to her pieces touching on war: simple, emotionally direct, urging nothing short of an end to war, in all forms, for any reasons.

Cheryl O, a cellist with salt and pepper hair, composed often somber, consistently emotionally potent accompaniment; a marriage of the sharp and the glossy set a tone akin to the sensation of being present in a George Orwell dystopia. This proved to be an outstanding combination with verse and dance.

Sasha Ivanochko’s dance was striking, unexpected and, when combined with Cheryl O’s cello, chops, effects and loopers, mercilessly engrossing. Sasha established the distinct impression she was embodying a single tortured creature, composed of the collective disturbance of a people, desperately attempting to grasp, to reconcile what they have been bred to believe, about just and unjust wars, the valuing of human beings, with the present state of the world.

Next week’s Figure of Speech is the last of the season, so be sure to drop by Majlis theatre.

Edited By: Kit Cat (http://tinyurl.com/3a5bzhq)