A Mouthful of Birds

A Mouthful of Birds
Written by	Caryl Churchill and David Lan
Date premiered	1986
Subject	Possession, madness, and female violence.
Genre	Play with dance

A Mouthful of Birds is a 1986 play with dance by Caryl Churchill and David Lan, with choreography by Ian Spink. Drawing its themes from The Bacchae of Euripides, it is a meditation on possession, madness and female violence.

The play has an unusual structure; it is a series of seven independent vignettes each focusing on a different character. After every scene, a moment in the tragedy of Pentheus is seen. Dionysos, a dancer, watches the action invisibly, and his kiss causes each episode's central transformation. At the play's end, the characters return to give epilogues narrating how their stories continued.

The episodes include:

The actors play ensemble roles in all scenes other than their own. Dance sequences are at the center of the episodes involving the pig and his lover, the schizophrenic and her hallucinated tormentor, and the serial killer.

The play's perspective on mental illness and sexuality is strongly influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, who also wrote a monograph on the life of Herculine Barbin, as well as David Lan's own anthropological work on possession and non-Western religions.

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