with Nina Hansen
directed by Magdalena Pietruska
Texts by R.D. Laing, Björk and L. Cohen
Textcollage: Nina Hansen and Magdalena Pietruska
Music: L. Beethoven, Napoleon IVX,
J. Plaetner
Stage design: Magdalena Pietruska
Light design: Roger Rolin
co-production with Outlawfields (Denmark)
length: 1 hour
performed in English

"Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world"
R.D. Laing.

Ronald David Laing's (1927-1989) controversial ideas and implacable criticism of modern society aroused big interest and was the subject of a lively debate during the sixties. In his opinion, society enslaved the individual in order to make him fit into more and more abstract rules, which hinder the individual's organic development as a human been.
The question of what is "sound" or "normal" as well as Laing's analysis of repressive society is as relevant today as it has ever been. We live in a strange world where right and wrong have become interchangeable; a world where we exult over the walls pulled down, but wink at those invisible ones that grow up.
We live in a time where one is "playing the game of reality with no real cards in one's hand" as Laing put it in The Bird of Paradise.

In the performance" Bird of Paradise" the poems from Knots take us on a journey in the landscape of the soul, an emotional switchback. The human soul, captive like a bird in a cage, flings between powerlessness and fury, between lack of understanding and sudden insights, struggling against succumbing, searching for the lost paradise.

"They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game.
If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game"
R. D. Laing, Knots