Singing Swallows

Stories are created to entertain and are used to explain and illustrate abstract ideas or concepts in a way that makes them attainable. Singing Swallows, created and performed by Romi Kupfer, is a wonderful new storytelling theatrical experience about young Holocaust survivors; its aim is to prick ears and spark imagination not just for the young, but for everyone.

Singing Swallows tells the stories of four young people who survived the Holocaust, via a narrated sound mix of recordings by young performers. It also includes the voice of an elderly man and an ambient electronic soundscape. Audiences are requested to wear headphones, as do Romi Kupfer and her rotating child performers Sol and Flora Feldman.

The stories coincide with their physical performance utilising recycled props such as cardboard, boxes and plastic wrappings while building a makeshift ghetto - playing in the open farms in France before carted off to Poland and or Germany.

The performers symbiotic connection is evident as they move in their confined space constructing, deconstructing and improvising actions - the stories continue – playing games with potato peels to feed grumbling tummies and remembering drifting off to sleep hearing one’s father saying, “We will survive”.

Kupfer, who works in devising theatre for the young, has masterfully created a symbolic educational piece that will live on as Holocaust survivors leave the earth. While we think of them as children huddling together to stay warm in the ghettos; they as Elders pass on the message that “the earth is a beautiful place”.

Flora Georgiou

Photographer: Pia Johnson