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Songs on Dead of Children / Kindertotenlieder is a theater project analyzing the relationship between a parent and his child. It deals with the change of the child in its development. The theater project analyzes what it means to lose innocence, purity, immediacy, selflessness. How in a child, the process of growth, maturation and a sense of perfection are accelerated by his own parents. Aren’t the parents‘ desires projected onto the child too soon? Can a person keep his purity? Only a disease preserves a human purity; a person who knows no intrigues – is a little boy with a mental disability like that? Will he/ she still be an innocent child’s soul? The production connects the eponymous work of Gustav Mahler’s song cycle Kindertotenlieder with the real world of two little peers (7-year-old Zoja and an autistic Felix). Mahler’s transcendent songs are in this project not a sad scenes. They are the departure of children’s souls and their transformation. They do not mean death. They are a change and a loss of what fascinates us most about children – their purity.
In the project, a five songs become a five images of parents‘ interaction with their own children. Dancer Renata Ptačin and her daughter Zoja create a suggestive model in which they explore the limits overcome by the desire of a little dancer, musician and actress. Felix, an autistic boy, arrives to continue the analysis of what childhood happiness and its gradual transformation means. What does mean his happiness and his mother’s joy…
Premiere: 5. 6. 2023 / 19:30_Terén: Pole perfomrativního umění, Brno
18. 6. 2023 / 17:00_Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava
27. 6. 2023 / 19:00_Divadlo X10, Prague