Estranged twins, Tomasz and Steph take opposite sides of two warring tribes. One fights for the supremacy of mind over body, the other defends their sensory world… to the death. In fable style, Falling Heads examines history mistold as a tool of the state. Who wins when the story is lost?
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Press: Diego Fajardo
Press: Alexander Clouston, Angelique Ye Zhou
The forces engage; Touch: Alexandra Clouston, Angelique Zhou, Damon Branecki, Tessa Marie Lumati
Alexandra Clouston, Damon Branecki
Angelique Zhou, Diego Fajardo
Synopsis: Falling Heads is a co-devised theatre performance arising from Akutagawa Ryunosuke's 1917 wartime story. The performance follows two tribes with common roots, the People of the Sunflowers who colonise the lands of the People of the Wild Boars. In a Brechtian fabled style, the story centres on estranged twin siblings: Steph, a Sunflower regime sympathiser and her twin brother Tomasz, a poet dissident of the Wild Boars. In embodied scores, dialogue, sculptural battlefield reportage and folk acapella, the Sunflower authoritarian ideology of Cartesian 'pure thought' overcomes the Wild Boar sensory experience of the world. The oracle foretells the split, the Sunflower captain conducts conversion therapy, the shopkeeper runs resistance, the twins meet in death, the Sunflowers cover ancient graves—ultimately, the Reporter asks why any history should not be questioned.
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Collaboration
The Thursday Group partners with ISLA Collective and Teater Momentum for this exchange project and is grateful for the support of the Odense Municipality Culture Fund and the Australian Culture Fund.
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International CollaborationOur partners for this project are firstly Andrea Albernaz of ISLA Collective, Odense. We came to work with Andrea through Thursday Group member Angelique Ye Zhou who in 2023 began her residency in Odense, Denmark. We are really excited that, following generous support from the Odense Municipality Cultural Fund, and with the support of Teater Momentum, the collaboration has been confirmed and that in October-November, 2025, Thursday Group will rehearse and perform with Andrea and two other Danish artists in Odense.
Formed in 2020, Andrea Albernaz’s group, Isla Collective, Odense shares an approach that focuses on the activation of movement and the body, with a specialisation in sensorial language and object theatre. In 2023 and 2024, Angelique collaborated with Isla Collective on the creation of a shadow puppets scene for Falling Heads—the first milestone in our international collaboration.
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Education: Practice toward Performance-making
Falling Heads is a co-devised play based on our practice development experiments:
∞ Representation of war—‘Touch’ improvisations inflected by Grotowski/Stanislavski impulse/action: offer | recognise | touch | experience | separate. Broadly, these embodied improvisations offer paired bodies as unified whole or paired bodies as aggressive dysfunction.
∞ Atmosphere: Fictional world created using Michael Chekov inflected visual-art prompts.
∞Psychophysical: Lev Vygotsky and Stanislavsky research linking inner and expressed voice—character-memory and spontaneous narration for co-devising text.
∞Shadow-play: Following Angelique Zhou's development of Shadow-play techiniques, One of the Oracle’s auguring modes is shadow play.
∞Intonation: Poland’s Song of the Goat (Piezn Kózla) body-voice improvisations have informed the creation of song leading to Brecht/Weill-like acapella ballad composition.
