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And the Birds Did Sing

 
Stephanie Green Review by Stephanie Green 3 Published: 7 Aug 2019 Dance Base Show Dates: 2 Aug 2019-11 Aug 2019

Christine Devaney’s And the Birds Did Sing is a gentle, moving meditation on the loss of her father, expressed through story-telling and some expressive physical movement to an evocative score by Luke Sutherland as she comes to terms with grief.

Devaney bears her soul with sensitivity.

The set is strewn with hundreds of screwed up paper balls in rows which Devaney contemplates, then rearranges. A ball here, a ball there. This goes on for far too long but it is worth putting up with this preamble for the story that follows in which Devaney bears her soul with sensitivity.

Hanging at the back of the stage are a collection of large paper formless shapes, and it is unclear at first what they represent. As the story unfolds the most likely interpretation is that they are vast bird wings as the story centres around her neighbour whom Devaney as a child nicknamed Birdie due to the woman only being seen through an upstairs window feeding the birds.

The story progresses through snatches of arresting observations. The sound of water in the street drains is ‘the devil trying to keep clean’ and a beggar is ‘selling her hands’. As her attempt to control her life by collecting the paper balls into piles proves impossible, she kicks them apart. Crouching into a ball herself, hands wound around herself, her despair is apparent. Eventually, a relationship with a lover is expressed through fluttering hands and hope appears to be in reach. It is what she learns from Birdie, however, that begins the process of healing.

It is only a pity that Devaney does not trust her own poetic fragments and expressive movement to suggest the meaning of this piece, instead of spelling it out to us.

Amir Nisi

Stephanie Green

Stephanie Green has reviewed Theatre and Dance in Edinburgh since 2011 but previously travelled widely, mainly in Eastern Europe and Russia, writing about puppetry. She also studied shadow puppetry and sacred dance in Bali. In the 1970s, she trained as a puppeteer at the Little Angel, London and later worked at the alternative In the Heart of the Beast Mask and Puppet Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. After training at the Place, the London School of Contemporary Dance, in her 20s she then gave up dancing until starting again in her 60s just for fun. She has recently danced in a community group with Barrowland Ballet (at the Edinburgh Fringe, 2013), Oceanallover and at the South Bank, London as part of the Festival of the Silver Age. She is also a novelist, playwright and poet. www.stephaniegreen.org.uk/

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This is about living but it began with a death. This is about existing and not existing, and a child’s heart-bursting belief that there is something in between. This is about love. A woman remembers a girl who knew a woman who listened to the birds. Inspired by the depth of feeling in one tiny moment of knowing that the world will never be the same again, this evocative solo work, a collaboration between choreographer Christine Devaney, musician Luke Sutherland and artist Yvonne Buskie, explores the interplay between music, dance and the origins of stories.
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