The Swinging Door

A performance by Peter Rose and Annamaria Faraone

directed by Peter Rose

The Swinging Door opens at The Grotowski Institute

Wroclaw, Poland

26th & 27th September 2014, 19:00h

Laboratory Theatre Space
Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego
Rynek-Ratusz 27, 50–101 Wrocław
Admission: 15 PLN 

Bookings and tickets: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Tel. 71 34 45 320

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.

"When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of and at the same time dependent upon everything. This is absolute freedom." Shunryu Suzuki

In the cemetery
in the brothel
at the campfire