Falling Heads
Artwork Jack Kirby Crosby
from a photograph by Angelique Zhou
of Tessa Marie Luminati and Damon Branecki in rehearsal, June 2024
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FALLING HEADS
Estranged twins: Tomasz and Steph, take opposite sides of two warring tribes. One tribe fights for the supremacy of mind over body, fights for their belief… to the death. In a Brechtian fabled style, Falling Heads examines history mistold as a tool of the state. Does anyone really win when truth is the cost?
The forces march
The forces engage; Touch: Alexandra Clouston, Angelique Zhou, Damon Branecki, Tessa Marie Lumati
Damon Branecki—Tomasz the Poet
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
Shadowplay Tessa Marie Luminati, Alexandra Clouston, Angelique Zhou (puppetry)
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
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.
Design Sketches, Matthew Crosby.
At The Thursday Group, sustainability of design goes hand in hand with our Poor Theatre aesthetic. Bits of bamboo and home-made paper, hemp costume, home-made, actor-operated, green-charging battery LED's… and even though we have a roll, we are frugal with the gaffer tape. The sets and lighting are super easy to tour and set up and down. We think the approach adds a special aesthetic to our work—Falling Heads is no exception.
Sc 18 Steph Records Testimony for the Reporter... both turn throughout.
Dedication of the Panopticon
The Oracles tell a story
Steph and Tomasz are executed
Costume of the Wild Boars and the Sunflowers
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Education: Practice toward Performance-making
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.
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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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