An intimate headphone experience arrives at Theatre Works just in time for the June-July school holidays designed to connect young people with those who went through the Holocaust.
Singing Swallows is a compilation of four Holocaust stories, created for young audiences between the ages of nine and 18 years old. Each story focuses on four different journeys of Jewish children/young adults during the Holocaust. The stories, compiled from interviews with Holocaust survivors are voice recorded by young Jewish children in primary school. In between verbal storytelling, performers on stage activate a recyclable set, bringing to life the personal experiences heard through individual headphones worn by the audience.
Melbourne theatre maker Romio Kupfer explains:
Singing Swallows is about connecting young people with those who went through the Holocaust. The performance explores what life was like for a young person during this time and how much they might’ve understood that their communities, identity and lives were at risk. This show tries to spark the imaginations of the young audience through technology and physical performance. I made Singing Swallows to be a starting point of Holocaust education, to connect young people with the messages from our Holocaust survivors, messages of love, peace, acceptance, strength. So that when they do engage with Holocaust education, they feel connected to the stories and have empathy and interest to what happened.
Read the article by Gabi Bergman at Aussie Theatre.