Les Mers Rouges
(The Red Seas)

The Collective for Living Theatre in participation with Calipix Productions is producing Liliane Atlan's "Les Mers Rouges", a postmodern epic spanning five hundred years of a Sephardic Jewish family's history:

France's playwright Atlan has unearthed a powerful tale of her own family's legacy of survival.  "Les Mers Rouges" will be directed by Genie winning director Kalli Paakspuu (Best Live Action Short Drama for "I Need a Man Like You") and will feature a rich orchestration of Sephardic songs. Leonard Rosmarin who recently published "Liliane Atlan ou la quete de la forme divine" (Editions L'Harmattan, Paris. 2004) is translating this French play into English.

A layered storytelling through five narrators based on real persons, testimonies and documents takes us through the persecution under the Spanish inquisition to the Holocaust.  The singing of the ancestral love songs, a life giving and unifying force, gives meaning to exile and to the experience of Auschwitz.  "Les Mers Rouges" is a powerful survivor story to remember at the sixtieth anniversary of Auschwitz and offers an
affirmation of life, beauty and continuity of family.

"Les Mers Rouges" was premiered at the Le Festival  Avignon, the pre-eminent theatre festival of the Francophone world in Avignon, France.

To produce this extraordinary theatre, our collective has needed to make a commitment to raise funding from the public and private sector in order to offer this experience for a $10 ticket price (which cannot possibly pay for the work of our highly skilled professional artistic team).  For this purpose, as well, we will be working with High Park Youth House to raise money to provide an experience to at-risk neighbourhoods, street youth and Jewish youth.