THE TREE MITEM 12
ODIN TEATRET
The Trilogy of the Innocent
The Innocence of War and of Its Victimsga
The Trilogy of the Innocent
The Innocence of War and of Its Victimsga
Innocent is a luminous word. We don’t feel guilty because we are ware that guilt is a reaction of our conscience. And this reaction is not automatically associated with a misdeed that we may have committed considering it a legitimate defence. Let’s look at the face of war: that of a tiger. The tiger tears a child to pieces. This is obviously a tragedy, but it doesn’t tarnish the innocence of the tiger. Innocence does not take damage into account, it demands only purity of intentions. For those fighting in a war, innocence coincides with a respect for their role within the mechanisms of a struggle whose purpose is to exterminate the adversary. We don’t usually associate the word innocent with war, but with its victims, those who don’t commit outrages and destruction. We think of orphans, widows, women who experience the innocence of war on their bodies. Odin Teatret’s trilogy speaks of the many forms of innocence, asking the question: are we all, perhaps, innocent?
Trilogy - First landscape: the past (1990-2000)
A land abandoned by birds
At the heart of the space, ancestrally bound to life, the tree of History grows vigorously and dead. The characters gravitate around this vegetal cathedral, alive yet extinct. Warlords, with their armies of child soldiers, sow death and chaos. Monks plant a pear tree in the Syrian desert, hoping that the absent birds will return. The daughter of a poet evokes her childhood dream to fly together with her father. A Nigerian mother flees hiding the head of her daughter in a gourd.
As customary in Odin Teatret’s performances, different languages and behaviours mingle, confronting each other. Actors from Bali, Canada, Chile, Denmark, India, Italy and England give life to a rite evoking mythical situations and historical facts.
In the faint light of the final scene, a Liberian and a Serbian warlord - real historical characters - fraternise. Twittering birds announce their return in a landscape that recalls Chateaubriand’s words: forests were there before civilisations, deserts followed civilisations.
The tree of History finally bends under the weight of fruit and offers a home to the birds that are flying over the heads of the spectators. But what kind of birds are they?