Rainbird – World Premiere

Rainbird is an adaptation of the novel Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room by the celebrated New Zealand author Janet Frame that tells the story of a middle-aged family man in New Zealand named Godfrey Rainbird who gets hit by a car and is pronounced dead.  After the funeral arrangements have been made and his belongings have been cleared from the house, he wakes up in the morgue. What ensues is the emotional struggle of the Rainbird family, not in accepting Godfrey’s death, but, rather, his resurrection. Now a symbol of death, he is ostracized by his community and his family destroyed.

Rainbird mixes improvised arias over minimal loops, original folk songs, and textural spaces to create a sense of disorientation and emotional intensity. The New Zealand landscape is depicted in short video interludes by New Zealand video artist Andrew Denton. Music, text, and video build through this 90-minute work as Godfrey’s world splinters apart and exposes Frame’s chilling vision of one community’s violent response to the unknown. Rainbird is an allegory, both ordinary and mythic, about those who return from the dead, as Frame notes, their “unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession—equal in its rapture and chilling exposure to ancient gods and goddesses.”