Daughters of the black rabbit is a gig theatre show in development combining heavy heavy sounds, cutting edge tech and good old fashioned story telling.
SYNOPSIS.
The Daughters of the Black Rabbit reform to perform a gig in tribute to their mother’s life and work. They sing songs of grief, love and wonder. They narrate their mother’s rich story from war baby to fierce lover in the sexual revolution, railing against the bomb and building a matriarchal community and a blueprint for new way of living.
The Daughters of the Black Rabbit weighs the beauty and devastation of human achievement and all that has come to pass since humanity narrowly escaped nuclear destruction in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” - Albert Einstein 1946
As we enter a new epoch - The age of the Anthropocene.
Human activity is threatening our world, humanity and all we have created
Ours is to survive - Ours is to find meaning - Ours is to imagine and create new worlds.
The play seeks to reconcile my personal undertaking to fully face the future without being immobilised by darkness and fear.
To remain awake, creative, sane, stable, in love and useful. Whatever may come.
We are relentlessly bombarded with competing narratives designed to engage our primitive fears and most base mythological sense of ourselves.
The rise of tyranny, environmental breakdown, technology, perpetual war and spiraling inequality and all the while we fall in love, write songs, toast bread, design space rockets, build hospitals, eat pizza, drink wine and coffee, raise cats and children, work jobs, make love, create stories to try to make sense of it all.
This is our chapter. what will we write?
The Daughters of the Black Rabbit is our attempt to make sense of the now by looking back on a chapter written 63 years ago.
Autumn 1962. The Cuban missile crisis.
The footnote in the atomic project is the perfect allegory by which we can view our own current existential threat. it is also a darn good yarn, the facts of which are now undisputed and laid bare by the recently released ‘Armageddon letters’ between Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy. Before the pandemic, the crisis was arguably the world's last truly global event. The 'civilised' world gathered around their radios believing each sunrise could be the last.
With the wars in the Ukraine and Middle East the parallels have become increasingly stark and literal.
I offer the simple proposal that our lives have a greater dependence on community, Connection, Love and the stories we share than that of domination, might and conquest.
It celebrates our dreams and accomplishments beyond mere survival and explores our role in shaping our futures.
‘We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us’ - Winston Churchill 1943
The same is true of our stories. (fuck Churchill tho)
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.”
- Ursula Le Guin 2014
