Ptasilot (Am Hafen mit Vogel) / performative reading live / PREMIERE

This summer, a few-year-old Nanina is about to take her first flight ever. She sets off to visit her grandmother who smells of cinnamon, coriander, meat, and warm milk without skin, and who lives in faraway Iran. At the airport, she meets a Dodo bird and discovers that the world is full of differences. How does the bird’s song sound in different languages? What is a transit zone? And what does a cosmopolitan actually do? Why do humans have passports, but birds don’t need them? Why are flags and borders so important to us when they are completely irrelevant to migrating animals? And what are non-migratory birds supposed to do, especially those who miss their bird grandmothers?

Ptasilot (Am Hafen mit Vogel) is a theatrical story about how an exciting event in a young child’s life can prompt many, often non-obvious, observations. The author explores the theme of individual freedom and the freedom of movement beyond the borders drawn on maps. Something that birds can enjoy and humans long for. The theme becomes a pretext for reflecting on unfettered thinking, free of prejudices and school-induced clichés. All of this is given in a light manner, far from didactic discourse, but at the same time – in a way that is ambiguous and gives the audience freedom of interpretation.

As described by the author herself, the show is structured like an onion. This means that it plays out simultaneously on several levels – realistic and fantastic, with all these layers mixing and interweaving with each other. The little protagonist revisits her own memories of her grandmother, her dad’s stories, and her conversations at school with her peers and her teacher, while simultaneously engaging in dialogues with the bird characters and experiencing sky adventures with them. She is able to draw inspiration from each of these encounters and conversations, often based on repetition, wordplay, and amusing slips of the tongue. An additional asset is the play’s melodious text, full of absurd humour, which in its linguistic layer refers to the tradition of Julian Tuwim’s poem Ptasie Radio (Bird Radio). We invite you to an event reverberating with bird song, treble, and chirping, and bringing a lot of joy to big and small spectators alike.

The Polish translation of the play was prepared as part of a grant from the Hessisches Landestheater Marburg. The copyrights for the play are represented in Poland by the Agency for Drama and Theatre “ADiT” in Warsaw.