A performance by Peter Rose and Annamaria Faraone
directed by Peter Rose
Imagine a castle, difficult to enter, surrounded by flowing ocean streams. There is a dark wood with no path. The "King with a thousand faces" embarks on a journey led by his jinny, his fair damsel. She is the Sorceress, Undine, Anna Livia Plurabelle. He is Perceval, Dante and Finnegan. The Swinging Door includes texts from: Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg, The Hollow Men and Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, Undine Geht by Ingeborg Bachman, Parsifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (among others). The Performers rediscover the myth through physical actions, monologues and songs.
The Swinging Door explores matters of sex and gender, personal mythology, the living and the dead. It is a Performance in body and voice which, intones the lives of Faraone and Rose. The performers are ‘bridge-builders’, moving to and fro, from within themselves to the other.
This rhythm of give and take, this swinging door is a bridge to independence as they share that breath we all require. The performers plough, ransack and revel through the landscape of their lives. They shed layers of dead skin through actions with objects: wood, stone, soft metal, water and the touch of clothing in a world where the performers are in contact, sharing.
Rose and Faraone reveal the urgency and ritual of the myth within themselves. They share this revelatory energy as a call to create.
