Anhelli’s theme is a phenomenon that Theatre needs to face in order to protect its essence and its place in this world. This is a theme of unity and disintegration of our life, our corporality, of our own selves. This is a theme of possession. Of making a vessel for the other, for a stranger’s life, even a future life, out of our own selves. This is a theme of illuminating, a theme of ‘over angeling’. This is a theme of being possessed by an angel.

How to make an angel transit through a human body; how to let that angel live there for a moment? In what musical form? In what vibration?

We live in cathedrals of our bodies, with ornamentation and gilding of facades, and with placement and relation to the others being of most importance. But the theme of Anhelli is calling for small country wooden churches where we stay enclosed in our aloneness. Closed within. Instead of cathedrals- small temples of the heart. Small churches of the body. Chapels and meeting halls. Here one calls spirits of their forefathers. And thus the unfinished forefathers’ eve project at the same `time transforms itself into a seance of calling the Angels. Their wings are not snow white. They are rather of the ashy, smokey grey of the ebbing souls.

One needs to involve their entire inner being, their entire life force to create vast space within oneself, create a void as empty as a Siberian abyss. So empty that it sucks in.

The program of concert consists of Byzantine and Sardinian paschal hymns as well as Ortodox Irmoses performed by actors of Teatr ZAR. The presented songs are an extended version of the musical score from Anhelli the Calling performance modified for the needs of the concert.

More information about festival you can find here