LET YOUR HANDS SING IN THE SILENCE

A performance for one actor - and a community - to recreate their own personal history from memory. How does displacement impact on what we remember? What do we choose to forget? And is it possible to create a temporary community to help us remember who we are? UK-based performer Robert Lučkay was born in the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia in 1976. At least five generations of his family have lived in Kosiče and in the small, rural villages nearby. Over the course of almost ten hours of interviews, director Maria Aberg maps his family tree and asks him to recreate what he remembers – and those he remembers - on stage. Using Lučkay’s reconstructed memories as a scaffold, the project invites local migrant communities to share, develop and perform their own memories alongside his. Together, they attempt to recreate a fragmented and unreliable past, interweaving their stories to create something communal out of what at first seems individual. LET YOUR HANDS SING IN THE SILENCE can be performed by a small group of strangers, by a choir of 50, or by unaccompanied migrant children. The project will be developed in close collaboration with local communities in each location it visits, to create a different-but-similar performance wherever it goes.