NYAB Event - "Sejny Chronicles" Experimental Play

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At La MaMa Experimental Theatre
Media: Performance Art

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The Sejny Chronicles, a story of the multicultural town of Sejny, is a stunning montage of oral histories and legends that are spoken, sung and danced around a baked clay model of the town.
Actors approach the town, listen to the houses, and hear a Jewish prayer from one, the Lord’s Prayer in Polish from another, and then in Lithuanian, and Russian… then lullabies in the many languages spoken along the shifting borders of Eastern Europe. The play is unusual because the actors – teen-age children of Poles, Lithuanians, and Russian Old-believers living until today in Sejny – tell the real stories and legends handed down by their own grandparents and great-grandparents. The performers represent the third “generation” of the youth to pursue this re-discovery of their roots. Uncovering these stories in the houses, one by one, in the dreamlike atmosphere of a scene by Chagall, they all become their own forefathers, voicing their memories of Roma caravans, Slavic solstice customs, and pagan legends, or in magically fluid transitions become the guests at a Lithuanian wedding or beggars gathering before the church. Then again they remember the tailor’s daughter Rachel, or the Jewish child rescued from imminent death. It is the richness of a multicultural past re-discovered and brought to life by its youngest heirs. It speaks with disarming power to any of us who may feel we have lost our roots.

Reviews

Edyta Kuzian

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