BATTY ISLANDS – a rock opera
BATTY ISLAND – A ROCK OPERA
Author: Katarzyna Wińska
Producer: Tomasz Wiński
Music: Polski Jad: Jan Małkowski, Dominik Mokrzewski, Agata Wińska
A theater experiment with children and adults from different cultural and social environments: the Masurian countryside, a Warsaw middle school, a center for the visually impaired, an orphanage, and a therapy center.
Independent work with these groups has been underway since 2011. Once a year we show the fruits of their collaboration on stage; in 2012, sixteen children from Dziubiele village performed in Warsaw with child participants from the Home for Small Children and teachers from the middle school. In 2013 visually impaired children joined Batty Island. In the spring of 2014 we showed the Rock Opera with fifteen „slow head” adults at the Open Door Foundation. Like their predecessors in this project, the actors brought their ideas to the performance.
Batty Island is a morality tale of sorts, whose underlying idea is: it is easier to hate than to understand. This is a tale of a meeting between children and adults from the city and the country on vacation many years ago, of encounters, choices, and experiences, of relationships with peers and adults. Addressing hot issues like adoption, conformism, broken families, and disability, the protagonists of this rock opera distance themselves from formulaic opinions, mock the superficiality of good-will projects, paternalistic activists, and an unreflective adherence to ideologies. The participation of people from the Open Door Center supplied a pretext for creating caricatures of prevailing and harmful stereotypes or views of OTHERS.
The name of the theater, BLUBOKS, is a polonized version of “blue box” – a film technique whereby the (originally blue or green) background is swapped for another image and the actors can be situated in whatever computer-generated environment one pleases.
Bluboks Theater uses the name of the film technique in a figurative way; it places the actors in a society, environment, situation, or experience that is entirely unfamiliar or off limits to them. In this new “scenery” the viewers see the actors in a new light. Whereas before they were treated with disdain or contempt, now they are admired for their originality, their sense of humor, their ability to adapt etc. All the things we would never have expected of them.
Katarzyna Wińska
A ROCK OPERA – BATTY ISLAND
Author: Katarzyna Wińska
SONG I
“Playing Twenty Questions”
- 1. What has long, protruding bristles? – A backswimmer? – No.
- 2. What has transparent wings with black veins? – The goat moth? – No.
- 3. A blackish-brown abdomen…. – The hoverfly? – Yes.
- 4. Stripes on the back… – The water boatman, maybe? – No.
- 5. What has striped abdominal segments?- The dusky cockroach! – Yes.
- 6. Whose wind pipe is like a long tail… – The leaf beetle? – No.
- 7. Brown at the shaft… Is it a tiger beetle? – No.
- 8. It climbs on a tree and sings…The long-horned beetle – Ergates Faber? –
- 9. Whose googly eyes often give people the shivers…- I know: the deer fly!
- 10. It dips its long tongue in nectar… – I don’t know…
- 11. Its gills pump water two ways…- The fairyfly. – That’s right.
- 12. Its lips are like sponges for absorbing liquids… – The birch sawfly? – No.
- 13. Its ears hang down below its knees…- Donacia brevicornis? – No.
- 14. Wings that are shiny blue on the surface are found on? – The morning-glory plume moth! – Yes.
- 15. What has black wings with a fancy red rim? – The bee fly? – No.
- 16. It nibbles on rumex…- The black arches! – Yes.
- 17. It has dull red legs…- The inland floodwater mosquito? – I’m afraid not.
- 18. It has a ribbed dorsal… – The oil beetle… – No.
- 19. The back wings have a spot on the edge of the? – Braconidae! – Correct!
- 20. (last question) What has furcula under its small abdomen? – The Collembola! – Bravo! Yes!
SONG 2
“THE QUARREL”
MAMA: (cries) /PAPA: (answers)
Larder beetle /Raspberry crazy ant
Weevil /Trumpet pitcher
European mole cricket /Fungus gnat
Blue death-feigning beetle /Stink bug
Long-tongued bat /Vinegar fly
Common clubtail / Blow fly
Poplar-and-willow borer /Tarnished plant bug
European rhinoceros beetle /Cardinal beetle
Bacillus ferment /Crane fly
Spotted longhorn /Stag beetle
Boll weevil /Spittle bug
Puss moth catepillar /Brown squash bug
Devil’s coach horse /Snakefly
Assassin bug /Mealy bug destroyer
King worm /Russian leather beetle
Twisted wing parasite /Pleasing fungus beetle
Tumblebug /Mischievous bird grasshopper
Augochlora sweat bee /St. Andrew’s cotton stainer
Twice-stabbed lady beetle /Hickory horned devil
Pseudapion/Black garden ant
(unisono) : Vampire moth, Rough woodlouse, Wandering spider Saucer bug
Giant weta, Square-legged camel cricket, Blow fly!!!
SONG 3
“HONEYMOON”
Mother: My dear: Curculio, Notarini, Rhamphini, Tomicini, Titanus giganteus, Tibellus, Euroleon, Eumerus, Jumping plant louse, Hollyhock weevil, Bibio, Meteorus, Hummingbird hawk moth, True bug, Midge.
Father: My sweet: Stenurella, Smaragdina, Soronia grisea, Cicindela, Coccinella, Chryzolina, Drusilla, Hailara, Rosalia, Mieigenia, Smaragdina, Stenurella.
SONG 4
“BOMBYLIUS SUPERBUG”
He’s buff and large and his back is shaggy he wakes and climbs on six legs eyeballs on long antennae and huge ears behind every knee he chomps he soars look at him go. He crouches flat on the ground on fences in fields in scruff any old place he never flips or stumbles. He won’t pupate he won’t strip trees bare and he digests on the outside – and all around the world.
Refrain: This ain’t no advertising – we’re not just whistling Dixie. He’s born with all this stuff – it’s all so weird and simple.
BOMBYLIUS SUPERFLIER
BOMBYLIUS SUPERBUG
He’s got a pointy face with a proboscis he makes a racket in the scrappy bushes and the undergrowth and his legs are long
He’s got short furry ragged segmented wings, they’re solid membraned leathery when he hears something rustle
His legs dangle on the ground or he throws himself and waits till a fly comes along at the end
Of May on the thorn of a blackberry bush at the edge of a clearing in a cellar he warms up in the litter unless he’s running
Up an aspen on cold days no perennials and conks for him he’s too busy sipping nectar from the buttercups his back thighs swell a bit
Refrain
At the turn of March and April he sits in the elm sap he buzzes he whistles he clicks with his throat
He tilts and closes his wing coverts he bumbles in the bushes for three minutes his feelers seeking warmth
He beds down he dries his thin hair he smooths his scruffy pendants and palps he gives steam from
Gills through spiracles in early June he sails a puddle using his breathing siphon
He drifts with his body he’s got a skimpy wing cover he barely shields his stylet he feeds at noon at the edges of the pear on the tissue and skin his micro-mini-mandibles crush grind bite into vegetable crops
Refrain
In evening in August they press their spongy lips to the cowpiles and suck at will macrotrichia
Under the brow he also wets his clypeus at night he’s sulfur-yellow flat and armored though he’s sometimes thicker
Or thinner he flattens his body to fit through narrow cracks under crumbling bark or railway tracks
In the cracks in a sidewalk in a ditch a growth on his sclerite and urticating hairs on his leg segments
It bristles it gives a gamey stench from its glands when darkness falls it can be anything
He’s a pollen-eater root-eater needle-eater flower-eater leaf-eater and sometimes he builds a cocoon
His rough stick-legs dig him into dunes by the roadside a few times in his life
Refrain
In winter a dull glitter is a frequent sight he doesn’t stroll he doesn’t glide he doesn’t crouch
He bores with a claw he gnaws he damages the railroads his legs are very sticky
In the dark and dusty corners he neglects his hygiene he wouldn’t sneeze at some dew drainwater melted snow
In the dried twisted humulus leaves in the nettles in the new moon and the full moon the little guy suddenly gets up and most of his dorsal slides out his calves and feet and his mandibles glisten
He demonstrates sexual dimorphism he folds his wings flatwise on his abdomen with a thin ovipositor
Refrain
SONG 5
“SURVIVAL ON CUCULIA”
Refrain:
Cuculia – it ain’t no jungle
Cuculia – it ain’t no desert
It’s Entometropolia
Megavulgaris Pseudolycilla
Entoman won’t go extinct
If he emigrates and keeps evolving
He has to adapt or his health’s in trouble
He’s in a fight for his life – it’s all right if he keeps from flying
But when he takes off, he’s got to keep out of sight
And out of earshot, no one must mistake him for
Entoman of Lunaria; he comes closest to resembling
a conventional pupa or a concealing cocoon
when net-winged insects were all the rage, a camouflaged cockroach
this year he’s orange, and next year, orange-and-black.
Refrain:
He’s got to run with the swarm, in circles, not zigzags
No acrobatics or deft maneuvers of his own
Or he’ll be the butt of all the jokes like a visitor from Bohunk Lunaria
He shouldn’t cool off so far from the warm enclaves;
The flower pots, ovens, jars, behind the wardrobes and in the terraria,
Though he bores his ommatidia into the pane and the stuffiness makes him swoon….
Refrain
When his fur coat doesn’t cover his body
In the winter he hibernates curled up tight
He saves on food, on drink, on flying,
In the summer he never stretches out on the hot asphalt
Which sucks the moisture from him, like the spongy lips of a fly
When it comes to water – it’s no picnic
Drinking it from puddles on the street, so he bores holes in the park
But when they’re full, and the silt sinks to the bottom
He slurps the water carefully, the fresh rainwater is good
But it has to be sweetened, it’s bland and lukewarm, and….
Refrain
