The Flock

This seemingly simple tale of ‘limiting’ a population of an animal species thus unobtrusively opens into a symptomatic node of contradictions of the overheated capitalism, where the questions of the causes of modern migrations and the consequences of global exploitation simmer in the background, as well as the rhetoric of the power and the technocratic insensitivity of the apparatus of the system. In the meantime, the pictures of dead birds multiply and the acting space keeps shrinking. In it the ensemble wearing everyday clothes in black and dark colours (costume designer was Tina Pavlović) resembles more and more the endangered flock and is decimated together with it – until with the last murdered crow and the epilogue, the sensitive and aesthetically clean production also ends.

All of them, clad in grey, black and denim, remind us of grey-black crows, and the stage looks like that, too: no props, with PowerPoint slides in the background. The actors begin with the story about the crows and then intertwine the documentary narrative about the events in Hoek van Holland with their own experience in the Netherlands, which functions as a travel lecture. The actors onstage are themselves, Lara Wolf speaks about her Colombian great-grandmother, Iztok Drabik Jug takes off his clothes, reading their countries of origin from the labels (Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, China) and they all recount their train trip to the Netherlands and talk about how immense the ports, where they load and unload the enormous amounts of cargo, are. Their narrative veers from the travelogue in the PowerPoint presentation and focuses again on the eradication of crows in Hoek van Holland; it is supplemented and upgraded with the quotes from emails exchanged between Sabina Rietkerk, who wanted to let the crows live and the NVWA (the agency responsible for the food and consumer goods safety in the Netherlands) which decided that the crows be exterminated.

The Flock stretches between artivism and documentarism. All the means of theatrical expression are in the function of the narrative and the element of spectacle is reduced to the minimum. […]  Shedding light on the problem of a flock of crows which has experienced a culling and extermination is in a way a thematical continuation of the play 6. In form as well, Divjak continues his poetic of an empty stage with merely functional signs and gestures, the narrative way of acting and the condensed narration, with the sound and lighting – also minimalised – creating the atmosphere. The problems that the flock of indigenous crows opens have a clear analogy in the momentary European present – in the migration of people, as well as of other animal and plant species that we can call foreign, sometimes invasive. But we never ask ourselves where the everyday consumer goods – clothes, technical and other devices, all labelled as Made in China, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia and others – come from.