K Samka

"The Storks Fly Away" is the third part of a trilogy that tells the story of three generations of a family that lives somewhere on the Mediterranean.
The Trilogy, published by Actes Sud – Papiers, had started with Penelope O Penelope (created in 2008 at the Théâtre National de Chaillot, won Prize of the Critics). It relates the loving obstinacy of a wife waiting for the return of her husband, gone to war. Then came The Last of the Farting Days (created in 2013 at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Marseille and at Les Amandiers CDN of Nanterre, nominated for the Molière's 2014 – French speaking living author). It tells the way the girls of the family liberate themselves from patriarchate, at home and in religion.
The Storks Fly Away (created at the end of February 2017 at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Marseille) takes place, in fact, in the middle od this trilogy; This last part recounts the family torn by war, the sinking world, the paradise lost.

In this trilogy, I created a unity of place: Mediterranean, or to be more precise: the quarter. I do not name any country and lose my way in an imaginary geography. I keep being hazy, that’s why the names I give my characters are free from any connotation - I was about to say, from any copyright – free from any national or religious connotation. Zéla, Astrig, Théos, Vava, Aris, Minas, Dina, all are names that circumvent the certainties and fears the wars cause today. I confuse the issue in order to let the spectator’s mind make concessions, dump some ballast. For sure, I’m not a strategist in drama, but I want to avoid interference, I want to leave the listeners free in their choice, I want to avoid inciting them to keep those sectarian "believes", that dismissal of reality that the media, greedy for sensational stories, distil for them day-to-day. The whole approach, which is almost a stratagem, consists in defusing the certainties of those who think they know. It allows me to be frontal in my writing, it gives me the intimate space of the close-up, the space of the fight hand-to-hand. It permits me the verbal brutality and the distance brought by lyricism. I had let hang the vague, now I let hang the doubt over the matter. I let it settle in everybody’s sky, and I do it on purpose. I "relocate" war and let the spectator fix the place in his own imaginative world, according to his own topicality. I want him to turn his back on what he supposedly knows – this knowledge having been imposed upon him surreptitiously or not – I want him to start deciphering his own cartography, the one of his own thought. I want him to get lost and I want to leave him free to choose to end up in the epicentre of the conflict. The imaginative world can’t be conquered by flags, by deadly believes, by monocyclic legends. My Mediterranean has no borders, no standards, my Mediterranean is a song murmured for centuries, centuries to be...
View tour dates Interview Simon Abkarian - Radio Grenouille - Turn the light on (FR)