With Agnieszka Kazimierska (Poland)
Directed by Mario Biagini (Italy)
KATIE’S TALES INTERLACES SONG, POETRY, EVOCATIVE PHYSICALITY, AND STRIKING STAGE IMAGERY, TO CREATE THE DREAM TRACES OF ONE WOMAN'S ENCOUNTER WITH LOVE, WAR, ANCESTRAL MEMORY, AND A FUTURE STILL-TO-COME.
Katie’s Tales is the story of a woman and her lover who, after a terrible event, left her with the promise to come back, one day. It's the story of a garden, with an orchard of cherry trees.
Katie's life unfolds during savage times. Her beloved had to leave after the last catastrophe, but he promised to return.
Together with a couple of foreign servants, Katie lives protected in her garden, under the shade of her cherry trees, silent witnesses of her life and of History. Every day she receives visitors, every moment could bring the return of the one who left, and Katy keeps herself ready.
With her stories and her silences, Katie tells us of desire, and of waiting, and of all that is never said. She who waits is on a journey herself, on the road of her life sculpted in vivid frames, under the shade of the cherry trees thick with memories and unfulfilled desires of many generations. - She is a woman standing in front of History, facing her own lights and her own shadows. Standing at the crossroads of past and future, armed with her desire, she weaves moving evocations of imbricated pasts and deeply wished-for futures.
The desire that Katie embodies invites us to question ourselves about where we belong, to ask ourselves questions about the role of our consciousness, in the deafening flow of events and in the confused whirlwind of desires.
'How can such a pure feeling emerge from an actor's body?' (Franco Acquaviva, Sipario.it).
“Katie's Tales is a complex and multi-layered meeting with Katie – a girl whose life’s experiences and fate are encapsulated in the songs… [the name Katie] is traditionally used in Polish folk songs, poetry and tales, as a name of a female hero. Therefore, the encounter with Katie is a meeting with thousands of women whose experiences were excluded from and silenced by the heroic histories written and retold by men… [Agnieszka] transforms her solo performance into a fascinating dialogue with her Foremothers and – at the same time – her kinswomen.” (Prof. Dariusz Kosiński, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland)