“Welcome to our nest,” the young, white-clad actor says to me as I approach the York Redoubt staging area for Icarus, Falling of Birds.
He whimsically offers me a paper feather from the nest that I pin to my sweater. I have unwittingly become a bird and tied my heart and soul to a true and a sad story.
Icarus, Falling of Birds is an amazing and deeply moving experience in how art helps people process tragedy. The one-hour show, created by Halifax’s Gale Force Theatre and inspired by the book by poet Harry Thurston and photographer Thaddeus Holownia, starts with a simple statement of facts presented by the “birds,” the young actors in white, standing on a hill top.
In September of 2013 7,500 migratory songbirds died after being drawn to a hundred-foot-high flare at the Canaport Liquefied Natural Gas plant in Saint John, N.B. The dead birds were kept frozen at the New Brunswick for two years before a trial in which the company was charged $750,000 for violating the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act, first passed in 1917.
The show then unfolds to make people throughly understand the depths and nuances of this tragedy through music, giant puppetry and movement before Harry Thurston reads his masterful poem. By this time people are opened up sensually and emotionally to take in all his descriptions, metaphors and analysis of industrial greed and environmental disaster. The experience during this reading – even on a beautiful summer night of ocean breezes and rustling leaves – is one of pain. At the end one of the “birds” gives me a Holownia photograph of a dead yellow songbird as a memorial gift and I don’t want to take it (though, of course, I do).
Thurston makes the birds’ migratory journey – as the audience itself moves through four performance spaces – and the lushness of the “paradise” of Atlantic Canadian nature deeply felt before introducing the fiery death of the birds and the look and feel of their dead bodies.
The fact that young people play the birds only deepens emotion and fear; young people are the ones who are going to suffer the effects of climate change.
The second section of Icarus, Falling of Birds, is a gorgeous composition by Rachel Bruch performed by Anna Shabalina, cello; Japhy Sullivan, violin, and Indi Risoy Morales, violin. The music is playful and sweet, mournful and dirge-like, energized like flying, chittering birds, then slow and sad. The playing is intense and perfectly timed. I found myself with arms crossed rocking as if I were holding a child.
The giant hand puppets in the third section are intriguing; made out of straw they are manipulated so the fingers stand up and curl. They enfold the birds, release them, become a nest. Other times they seem to be the huge hand of fate or the hands of industry, malevolent instead of supportive.
Franziska Glen and Lily Falk, co-founders of Gale Force Theatre, co-direct this large-scale performance which is purposely set in the outdoors where songbirds might live. The puppetry is designed by Laura Stinson and Ian McFarlane of North Barn Theatre, Antigonish County.
In the youth ensemble are Tjása Allen, Jacob Ives, Avery Burns, Harjas, Charlie Mascola, Winnie Sherwood and Hope Stevens. Puppeteers are Dorian Arcturus Lang, Diego Cavedon Dias, Ailsa Galbreath and Coral Maloney.
The show, which ran two nights in Halifax at York Redoubt, is on tonight, 6 p.m., at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts though tickets are selling fast. https://artscentre.ca/two-planks/buy-tickets/
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NS reviews 
Oh how I wish I could’ve flown to that side of the continent and see this show. Sounds superb!
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