THE RAVEN

Photo by Anna Levin

“There is no beauty without some strangeness”

Edgar Allen Poe

Like Pinocchio, the figure in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ is not quite real. He sits at his desk, leafing over old journals and books ruminating, isolated, wrapped in cotton wool, and It is not just the shape of their beloved Lanore that is lost but with that he has lost but the realness of his own shape. Becoming empty, unattached to the present, a part of him frozen in time; “his face begins to look like his not quite incarnated life” Whyte.

If he was of this age he’d be doomscrolling; ‘spending too much time disturbing online content’, unsettling his inner content, obsessively checking the internet for news about a bad situations. Overstimulated and under xxx, Ears stuffed with cotton wool, he is dead in life. Until a bird enters his room and then real death.

What is it that is frozen within ourselves, the part that cannot move on? What is it that taps at the door, calling for us, asking for attention, to transform again in our life?

Charles is writing a new piece of theatre that explores these themes, that extends and amplifies Poe’s poem of a haunted man and a raven. Taking a multi media approach fusing movement theatre, poetic text and live video The Raven pushes at the edges between performance art and theatre making practices today.