February 13 2020 Portsmouth Tongues & Grooves BOOK HERE
February 18 2020 All Saints Centre, Lewes as part of ‘Experiments with Live Literature’ season BOOK HERE
February 20 2020 Birmingham Centrala BOOK HERE
February 21 2020 Clapham Library, as part of LGBTQ History Month https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/snow-q-at-clapham-library-tickets-86833895519BOOK HERE
February 22 2020 The Spire, Brighton BOOK HERE
Snow Q is a re-telling of Hans Christian Anderson’s much-loved fable, The Snow Queen, combining poetry, original music and visuals. This dramatized re-telling uses Anderson’s enigmatic tale of friendship, love and loyalty to explore contemporary themes of social isolation, gender, sexuality, migration and exile.
At the centre of the story are lifelong friends Gerda and Kai, two lost young people. When winter comes, ice enters Kai’s heart and when Kai disappears, Gerda embarks on a quest to rescue their lost friend, meeting a wise storytelling crow to guide the way.
Writer Maria Jastrzębska has re-imagined the story with a series of poems in the voices of the Crow and Gerda and Kai, who both identify as non-binary, and Kai as a missing person.
Maria says “As a child I was greatly disturbed by the idea of a piece of ice falling into your heart. Could someone else’s tears melt it? When I started writing Snow Q I knew Gerda and Kai were not going to be traditionally girl-and-boy in my version. But there are so many other stories within this story.”
She explains “I wanted to use this story to ask what it is that keeps us disconnected from one another and everything around us. How do we truly communicate with each other? Once ice has lodged in our hearts, can it melt?”
Snow Q features originally composed music, specially created video projections, sound design and poetry in English, Polish and “Ponglish” to show how language can transcend borders.