My pinky toe was a word

“Hello, hello, how nice of you to come by. As you may have heard, it is quite unusual that our house has disappeared. But we are surprisingly well, and our child seems especially happy.” The loss and the disappearance of the house, the jobs, the rules, and the limitations bring with them the dissolution of what used to be familiar and normal. Well-known words open up for new meanings: The small family in Tawada’s play settles into a world of language. Based on the letters of the alphabet, scenes, words, and images emerge. And sometimes they raise unexpected questions: Is water running in the word “shower”? How do you enter a house without a door? Do eagles sometimes dream of being rabbits? Does an umbrella need the rain? Unburdened by linearity or chronology, My pinky toe was a word is a dance of meanings, lending lightheartedness even to the potentially tragic and dramatic. The text is tangible and at the same time philosophical, it leaves room for the audience’s own associations and images.

“The alphabet of the world, each letter a word and the beginning of a scene - the play condenses into a small cosmos, the theatre of narrated things - Tawada has developed a fertile alphabet on which the actors grow stories, from A like another to Z like zero … a play that inspires to grasp one’s own language from Tawada’s marveling view.” (Thomas Irmer, member of the selecting committee for the Mülheimer KinderStückePreis 2011)