Kin: Content, Advice and Guidance

Gecko is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed physical theatre company, led by Artistic Director Amit Lahav.

When developing this information, we have tried to consider how to create a parity of experience for different audience members. As a physical theatre company, we use lots of different methods to tell our stories, including choreography and movement, set design, lighting design, sound design and music.

We try to create an environment in which our audience have an emotional and personal response to the show – we are less interested in everyone seeing the same story in our shows than in how the show makes them feel or encourages them to think about their own response to the themes we are exploring.

For Kin, these themes are migration, family, belonging, racism and empathy.

Since Gecko’s first show in 2001, Amit Lahav has worked with composer Dave Price who has developed an intimate relationship and working method with the company, which allows him to create original music that reflects the narrative and emotional tone of the piece. This is combined with a soundscape by designer Mark Melville.

Within the performance, our performers do use language, but our intention is that this should communicate emotion, and is supported by body language and facial expression. Breath is also used as a way of portraying emotion to support the narrative, and to allow the performers to connect to one another.

Unlike a more traditional play, language is not the main method of storytelling. Our performers come from all over the world and the speak different languages in the show, including Cantonese, Nahuatl, Norwegian, Malayalam Mandarin, Polish and Spanish. Often words are muttered, or sentences are left incomplete. As a result, no audience member understands all the language and the words spoken are less important than the emotion conveyed. We don’t use captioning or have BSL interpretation as this would translate all language into a single language and so create a different experience.

Where language is important in understanding the meaning of a scene, this is included in this document.

We hope that this information can be used in advance of the show to give an understanding of the way that sound and music feature within the performance. We welcome feedback and will always offer a BSL-interpreted post-show discussion alongside one of the performances.

The Officers’ Mess and Borders

The show opens with the exterior of a mess hall. From within, there is music suggesting a party. As the inside of the mess hall is revealed, the officers sing drunkenly. The music, mostly sourced from the Balkans, reflects the atmosphere – it is full of energy, featuring plucked stringed instruments and piano. As the officers dance together in a circle, the stringed instruments play multiple notes at once using their bows to create a discordant tone. It is inspired by traditional folk music and all the officers know the dance moves, perhaps suggesting a shared cultural background.

They drink more and the music turns to brass instruments. It becomes faster and more frenetic to reflect their behaviour.

There is a voice through a tannoy speaker – the kind of speaker that is often in public spaces to give instruction, like in a railway station – and the officers disperse. When we see officers speaking into handheld microphones their voices are distorted as if through a megaphone or tannoy speaker. Usually this is accompanied by a demonstration of power, between different officers, and between officers and people arriving at the border. Borders are represented by striped barriers that rise slowly, making a creaking sound, before slamming down with a bang to reflect the powerlessness of the people.

These are environments we return to several times within the show.

Puppet Sequence

About ten minutes into the performance, two puppets resembling an elderly man and woman appear. The speech in this sequence is recorded holocaust survivor testimony. It features Frank Bright MBE who invited us into his home, gave us his time and humanity, and shared his story of loss, empathy and survival, Freida Stieglitz from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education and Lydia Tischler from an interview with Channel 4 News.

The music that accompanies this section was inspired by lullabies. It begins with piano and clarinet and is evocative of Middle Eastern music to reflect the story of Lahav’s grandmother Leah, whose epic journey from Yemen to Palestine is one of the inspirations of the show. It shifts to cello, more evocative of Eastern European culture.

Transcript:

Homes and Displacement

Another key scene that features multiple times in the show is the home. Sometimes this is an image of stability and sometimes it is threatened.

The first home scene shows Leah reuniting with her family. The music features a strong deep female vocal paired with violin and flute. The presence of these instruments, and later also accordion and clarinet, acts as a cultural link to the puppets, and is returned to both within the music and through props. They are instruments typical of Jewish bands of the early 20th Century which are also small enough to be portable, reflecting the idea of migration.

There is an undercurrent of a beat that increases in pace, culminating in the ensemble sequence representing work and opportunity. The music in this section uses the major key. It sounds hopeful. This is carried into the home of Leah’s family as they receive payment for their work.

As the family’s situation becomes more precarious, sounds are enhanced to take on an expressive quality to reflect the emotions the characters are feeling, including:

• rumblings of the earth
• rhythms of winds
• drumming of rains
• rooms and buildings breaking apart

Leah reappears wearing a lifejacket. She blows, as if into a whistle and the sound morphs into a cry of distress. We see this action repeated by different characters through the show. This is the call to the ancestors for cultural and spiritual salvation. The response each time is an abstract choral representation of the respective family’s culture – an answer of sorts, a reflection, voices from the past. It is a love filled force.

Sound becomes more ominous on the arrival of the second family – the Karunas, and the conflict that ensues between them.

This family has a much more limited instrumentation reflecting their lack of resources – voices, clapping and a suitcase as a percussion instrument with the Armenian Duduk (an ancient woodwind instrument similar to the modern clarinet) and the Ethiopian Krar (an ancient six-string harp similar to the harp of David depicted in antiquity and very popular in modern Ethiopian music) being the only conventional instruments.

The mother of the Karuna family evokes memories of conflict and displacement with claps. The family stands looking out at the audiences as the sound of people having dinner is heard. It is cosy and familial. Suddenly, it is interrupted by a raid, with soldiers threatening to shoot.

The two families compete over the home space. At the climax of this conflict there are sounds of bombs and destruction. A member of each family argues with each other; dramatic operatic singing is morphed with distant explosions and the voices of the performers are distorted as they fight, reflecting conflict between the families and in the wider world.

With the arrival of the puppets, there is a piece of music played on a Duduk accompanied by a double bass playing gently underneath it, reflecting the different heritages of the families. This change in tone reflects reconciliation between the matriarchs.

Lifejacket Sequence and Declarations

In the last scene, all the performers appear in life jackets. They breathe audibly and cry out with distress. This is underscored by emotional music made using only the human voice. Sometimes it is wordless and sometimes it is in Amharic.

The lyrics approximately mean:

And

The song eventually washes out into the sound of the waves of the sea.

Each performer steps forward and directly addresses the audience.

After the declarations, the performers come together in a shared song of unity, empathy and forgiveness. Again, sung in Amharic, the lyrics translate as: