40 Feathered Winks

Published Tuesday 14 August 2007 at 13:05 by Gerald Berkowitz

Through dance, mime, movement and a limited amount of spoken dialogue, the performers of the Paper Birds Theatre explore some of the things that go on during the third of our lives we spend in bed.

Along with some group activities, such as depicting the pain and difficulty of awakening in the morning, several plot lines and groups of characters emerge, their stories told in alternating or overlapping scenes.

A man and woman meet at a conference, flirt, and eventually end up in bed, only to face the awkwardness and embarrassment of parting the next morning. A couple engrossed in their separate books in bed manage to have sex without losing their places. A woman sits by the hospital bed of her comatose sister, reading from a Spanish dictionary just to make her voice heard, while enough filters into the patient’s consciousness to produce Spanish-flavoured nightmares. A new mother battles the horrors of sleepless nights and postpartum depression. Throughout, a movement vocabulary built largely on rolling and tumbling, around, on, over and under the several beds onstage adds to the fluid, dreamlike air.