Les Vagues

Children from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves star in this performance, represented as ice puppets whose actor/puppeteer doubles give them voice and motion. As they dance and fly across the stage, the children age as in Woolf’s novel, shedding their childish apparel before beginning to waste away before our eyes. Water collects in a shallow pool upon the stage, further reflecting the light that ricochets through the melting ice limbs of the dangling forms. The pale luminosity and soft music are occasionally broken by the snapping of body parts that fall crashing into the pool below. The illusion of human warmth generated by the ice is uncannily intimate as the ice skeletons are tenderly cradled by the actors as though breathing their last breath.

The symphony of voice, flesh, ice, and water is orchestrated by an intricate system of strings used to literally embody the interconnectedness of human and non-human. The voices speak of love, betrayal, despair, determination and of returning to the waves as their lives ebb and flow. These deeply personal stories are shared, or co-embodied by the actors/puppeteers as well as placed on the symbolic level of the planetary. The performance opens with a large ice globe swinging gently then with increasing momentum across the stage before losing its bearings in mid-flight and crashing to the floor in an explosion of ice shards.  – A. Street