There We Will Be Buried 

Kai Althoff and Yair Oelbaum, There we will be buried, Stage play at The Palace Theatre, Southend-on-Sea, November 2011. Courtesy Focal Point Gallery. Photograph by John Salim.

Announcing the start of a new partnership, LIFT and ICA present There we will be buried, a unique play written and produced by Yair Oelbaum. With a cast including the renowned German artist Kai Althoff.

Oelbaum and Althoff play the two main characters, Orpah and Lydia – single mothers searching for a lost daughter. Oelbaum outlines the story as follows: ‘Orpah and Lydia are infantile paupers, whose spirits are sustained only through prayer – the only activity that they are truly capable of performing. They swoon endlessly, and are fractured into several simultaneous accounts of the same event. Like any eager child would, they stray from these scripts in their lust for true voices and sweets. Everything that crosses Orpah and Lydia’s path remains with them for all time; nothing is lost, nothing is left, nothing is re-covered.’


The characters in There we will be buried are fractured and represented not only through the physical bodies of each actor on stage, but also by pre-recorded audio and video tapes of prior, slightly differing performances. ‘There we will be buried’ presents a broken narrative, incapable of telling a single authoritative concrete story. Instead its interpretation relies on the degree to which these fractured elements are read as composite or dissonant. With additional cast members Yedidya Oelbaum, Jessica Polaniecki, Daniel Cowen and Alex Beth, each character is defined by the collision of the players’ true selves and their real life personas.

http://www.ica.org.uk/32680/Live/There-We-Will-Be-Buried.html