The Higher Song

Step into a world where ancient poetry meets burning contemporary questions. The Scenic Collectives HÖGproduction presents 'The Higher Song', a profound performance that takes its starting point in the most sensual text of the Bible. Here, the complex strings of desire, longing, and suffering that run through human experience of love are explored.

This is more than just theatre. It's a sensual and spiritual odyssey through the darkness of love's loss, a journey towards the emerging light that ignites when hope regains its footing. HÖGproduction strives to make the invisible visible, to reveal the piercing pains that hit the heart, but also the quiet strength that can heal. It's an honest search for comfort in the deeply human experience of unhappy love.

At the centre of 'The Higher Song' is the love between two women – a love that historically has carried both the stigma of the forbidden and the aura of the holy. For centuries, lesbian love has been met with silence, persecution, and erasure. By letting this love emerge and speak in its own voice, it's woven together with the Higher Song's ancient language of desire, closeness, and a longing that's almost divine. It's a bold challenge to patriarchal interpretation traditions, giving female desire and love its rightful place within a language that's traditionally been reserved for others.

The performance's own roots have grown from a deeply personal experience of separation and loss. Through a pioneering cross-cutting of diary entries, new writings, bodily explorations, and the Higher Song's timelessly words, the complex and often conflicting emotions that arise when love breaks are examined. Here, at the crossroads between body and soul, passion and prayer, a scenic space is created that cradles both pain and the possibility of reconciliation.

As a reminder of love's boundless force, the words of the Higher Song (2020) echo:

Love is strong as death,
suffering as unyielding as the grave.
Its arrows are flames of fire,
a blazing flame.'