Falling Heads

Falling Heads is an allegory arising from Japanese author Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s 1917 short story, ‘The Story of a Head that Fell Off’. Ours is a kind of dance-play that uses different performative modes and different aspects on the one story to examine the notion of mind-body dualism… we think of this as ‘splitting’. The peoples of the Sunflowers have split from their descendants, the Wild Boars. Wild Boars are earthy, Sunflowers became intellectual. Sunflowers return and colonise their ancestors' homeland. The Wild Boar twins Tomasz the dissident poet and Steph the traitor sympathiser have also split. Tomasz the poet imagines his head is off—how can he think when his mind is over there? He too is split. Ultimately, Falling Heads questions mind-body duality perhaps desiring the balance or wholeness of embodied perception. Like Akutagawa we question the veracity of a victor’s history. We question the intellectual justifications of war so removed from its physical consequences. We question how people can be so heartless.

Our major partners for this project are two collaborators from Denmark: Andrea Albernaz 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. Formed in 2020, Andrea’s group, Isla Collective, 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. Our second 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.