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“Standing on Fishes,” a new play by Martha Boesing, will be presented at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, June 21-22 at the Rappahannock High auditorium in Sperryville.
In the teaching style of Bertolt Brecht, The Bread and Puppet Theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, “Standing on Fishes” explores the issues and images of the environmental crisis. Many people — including scientists, theologians and philosophers — believe that as a species human beings are standing at a crossroads, that we have a decision to make in the next 10 years that is as monumental as the decision our ancestors made when they came out of the water onto the land, and that the decision will determine the fate of the planet.
The play is an attempt to explore the issues surrounding our choices.
Although the play is educational, the world of the play is non-rational, poetic and imagistic. Scenes are approached with the formality of ritual; language is heightened by whispers, sighs and singing and the use of flute, cello, drum and sung nursery rhymes evokes a world that has more of a kinship with our dreams than our waking life.
Actors play animals by wearing masks and recreating the movements of the animals, and the characters of the animals are abstracted and extended into dance so that they appear mythic, more formalized.
Audience participation is an integral part of the ritual of the entire play. As audience members arrive, they are invited to take a rock from a rock pile near the entrance, to hold it during the play and to choose a particular personal loss and allow the rock to represent that loss for them. The rocks will be gathered during the closing rituals of the play.
Ms. Boesing, founder and former artistic director at At the Foot of the Mountain Theater in Minneapolis, created “Standing On Fishes” with a 12-member company of actors and activists. The company is currently touring the show throughout the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada.
“Standing On Fishes” came into being when John Seed, an Australian envrionmentalist and founder of the Rainforest Information Center, passed through Minneapolis in the summer of 1990 and the idea of creating a play based on the Council of All Beings was suggested.
The play itself is a collaboration of people who volunteered their time in the hope that the play will indeed
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