Shadows of Tessa Marie Luminati of the twins: Steph the regime sympathiser and Damon Branecki, Tomasz the poet dissident.
Photo Angelique Zhou, June 2024
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Shadowplay Tessa Marie Luminati, Alexandra Clouston, Angelique Zhou (puppetry)
The forces engage; Touch: Alexandra Clouston, Angelique Zhou, Damon Branecki, Tessa Marie Lumati
Damon Branecki—Tomasz the Poet
The forces march
Shadowplay: Angelique Zhou, Damon Branecki (puppetry)
Angelique Zhou (puppetry)
Alexandra Clouston, Damon Branecki
The forces engage; Touch: Angelique Zhou, Damon Branecki, Tessa Marie Luminati, Alexandra Clouston
Angelique Zhou—the Oracle
Tomasz the dissident is taken: Damon Branecki, Tessa Marie Luminati, Alexandra Clouston
Steph and the General: Tessa Marie Luminati, Alexandra Clouston
Falling Heads—synopsis
Falling Heads is a co-devised theatre performance arising from Akutagawa Ryunosuke's 1917 wartime story. Our 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 style (think Mother Courage), the story centres on estranged twin siblings: Steph, a Sunflower regime sympathiser and her twin brother Tomasz, a poet dissident of the Wild Boars. Presenting embodied scores, dialogue, battlefield accounts and Brecht/Weill-style acapella ballad, Falling Heads explores pure thought ideologies seen as fake realities that overpower our embodied experience of the world. An oracle foretells the split of twins as the Sunflowers build over the graves of the Wild Boar; skirmishes continue as intelligence is gathered by the steam-punk AI Panopticon that ‘sees round corners’. A family is split, a reporter suspects the victor’s history, a shopkeeper’s loyalty is suspected, a captain conducts pure-mind conversion therapy. Ultimately, the Reporter asks the audience if the dead rising can be trusted to write the history. In a co-production, October/November 2025, starting at their home-base in Melbourne, Thursday Group will collaborate with Danish artists Andrea Albernaz and Iza Mortag Freund to premiere Falling Heads and tour Odense and Copenhagen, Denmark. Our extended practice investigations have created unique performance modes that excite us—we think they will excite audiences too.
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Practice toward Performance-making
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.
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International Collaboration
International Collaboration
Our major partners for this project are two collaborators from Denmark: Andrea Albernaz of Isla Collective, Odense and Iza Mortag Freund. We came to work with Andrea through Thursday Group member Angelique Zhou who in 2023 began her residency in Odense, Denmark. Thursday Group member Alexandra Clouston met Iza Mortag Freund while studying in Berlin. We are really excited that, following generous support from the Odense Municipality Cultural Fund, the collaboration has been confirmed and that in October, 2025, Andrea and Iza will collaborate with us in Melbourne and that Thursday Group will rehearse and perform with them and other Danish artists in Odense and Copenhagen in November.
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.
Collaborator Iza Mortag Freund is an established performer who has acted on renowned stages such as Schaubühne Berlin, The Royal Danish Theatre and Volksbühne, and has recently collaborated with Inuit artists in Greenland. Inspired by Denmark’s own colonisation history of the Greenlandic Inuit, she shares a vision for our project’s themes.
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