Cordelia, Mein Kind (Leiser-Moore, 2014)
Cordelia, Mein Kind has been performed in numerous venues/festivals around the world, including: Australia, San Francisco, Poland and Washington.
Cordelia, Mein Kind is a duet for film and live body; a personal exploration of a present-day Cordelia-like character revealed through language, physicality, image and film. Inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, the piece combines original interviews (between a contemporary Cordelia and her father, a Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivor now in his dotage and living in ‘exile’ in the Melbourne suburb of Bentleigh), and other visual imagery, with a language that is gestural, poetic, direct and physical. The multiplicity of performance languages weave seamlessly together, creating a challenging and unique performance work.
Cordelia, Mein Kind takes Cordelia’s silence as its starting point. It probes beneath the surface, exploding the silence to divulge a psychological inheritance and an emotional core linked to her father’s trauma – his history passed on to her – a history of exile and loss.
In this performance work the audience meet Cordelia as they enter – inhabiting the space in a silent ‘stand off’ with her father. She releases an explosive ‘howl’, and is (like Shakespeare’s Cordelia) about to be ‘hanged’. As she slowly descends to the ground, she enters into a netherworld between living and dying. A soundscape fills the space – one that intertwines a classic reading of Lear with her own father’s English/Yiddish cry of ‘howl howl…’ the past inhabiting the body and colliding with the present Cordelia.
Cordelia, Mein Kind is a work that doesn’t fit into a box of ‘theatre’ or ‘dance’ or ‘film’. Rather it is a piece that weaves these languages together. The piece is bold and audacious… it refuses to be pigeon holed. At the same time it remains intensely personal. Cordelia, Mein Kind weaves language (a mix of direct address to audience with more poetic and ‘performative’ style) and film with real-time performance, intertwining the three parallel journeys of the piece.
Additional production information.
Cast and Crew
Concept/Writer/video/Performer: Deborah Leiser-Moore
Director: Meredith Rogers
Text: Deborah Leiser-Moore
Music: Various
Set/Video designer: Deborah Leiser-Moore
Light designer: Deborah Leiser-Moore
Choreographer: Sally Smith
Performed at:
2014
La Mama Theatre
Celebrating Women Festival
Melbourne
2013
Festiwal Szekspirowski
Gdansk. Poland
2012
Marsh Theatre
Berkeley, San Francisco
2010
Searchlight Festival
fortyfivedownstairs.
Melbourne
2009
Under The Radar@
Brisbane International Arts Festival
2008
Theatre J
Incubator Program of New Works
Washington DC
Photo Gallery
Production notes provided by Deborah Leiser-Moore.
