Swans

The introduction doesn’t really want to be an introduction but ends up introducing the story anyway. That story doesn’t begin with ‘once upon a time’ but with a tiny dot. The tiniest dot imaginable decides one day that it has had enough of always being overlooked. After fleeing from a book, it narrowly escapes death (being crushed by a big mastodon of a bogey) and is picked up by a swan flying over en route to Siberia. Along the way, it transforms into a musical note and ends up in and like a swan song. In the next chapter – which only matters a little bit, according to the narrator – we meet Knob, who likes nothing better than to invent stories that feature swans while listing as many facts about the birds as possible. Knob would love to travel to Siberia as well, but the train is too expensive and as a cleaning lady in an amusement park she doesn’t earn very much. Eventually, we receive a postcard with her greetings from Siberia, where hippos dance the tango and caribous play cards.

‘Swans’ is a moving and imaginative story about daring to dream big and taking the plunge to go look for adventure. And of course it’s a show full of swans. The play is performed by a single actor or actress with musical accompaniment from a string section made up of nine swans.