Cuchillos en gallinas

(2006)

I always loved silence: when speech is silent something takes shape. Harrower designed - through the 24 scenes of his play - an anatomy of silence: the silence of creation bursts upon us: not the silence between two sayings, neither the horizontal silence that earth gives to the plow nor the silence before the storm: the silence here is the one that precedes creation.
When I look at The creation of Adam I can not help wondering about the space that Michelangelo decided to leave between the two fingers: the finger of the created – at the left - and the finger of the Creator – at the right -. A hiatus between them, a hole, a mystery. At that very place – I believe – language is born. In that silence of the image language happens: there the creature and his creator are named. The no one’s rose: the language. The silence is the beginning and then everything explodes. Like this.
David Harrower writes a play that unfolds – or tries to unfold - that mystery. Knives in Hens is written from that hiatus: Harrower is installed in between the creator and his creature. The piece seeks to reflect the power of silence and the power of word.
Inside the young woman - the heroine of the play – a war between silence and word breaks out: at the very beginning she wants to find a name for every cloud, every leaf on every tree for every movement of nature. The inherited names do not seem to satisfy her. A tree is a tree, but when the wind shakes the branches: “How do we call the tree?” – says she, thinks she, doubts she. Her husband – William, a farmer - tries to answer those questions. She does not seem to be satisfied with the answers. William - then – believes that she doubts about God. God has put a name to all the things on earth and these names of God are in the heads of men, He Himself has put those names in our heads. We cannot doubt: it is the only and inherited truth. The names are the inheritance of God and us – honouring the names - are honouring him; when we name things as God named them we are transformed immediately into creations of God, we inherited His language, inherit His traits, and inherit His silence.
Alejandro Tantanian

 

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Photos: Carlos Furman & Ernesto Donegana

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