Director’s Notes - Shona McCullagh
“As a choreographer, the medium of camera has always held a fascination for me, especially where the laws of gravity could be played with. The Greek myth of Daedelus, who created wings made of wax and feathers for his son Icarus, seemed the perfect vehicle to explore this idea.
The film concentrates on the scene prior to the inaugural flight of Icarus. The son in this treatment is deaf and is desperate to escape his gravity-bound world. The sign language used becomes the choreography but is coherent although exaggerated and extended into the whole of the boy’s body in places. His eager, comic energy already lifts him off the earth and he is frustrated by his father’s nervousness.
His father Daedelus is a brilliant inventor, who is torn between his desire to see his invention mastered and his fear for his son’s safety. He tries to impress upon Icarus the importance of “flying the middle way”; not too high so as to be near to the sun, and not too low to be drawn into the waters below.
Those who are familiar with the myth will know this flight ends in tragedy as the wings melt when the boy flies too close to the sun.
The myth itself reflects on the need to balance, with control of the mind, the danger of following the path of desire, enthusiasm and emotion. The film, I think, describes the process of a parent letting go of their child. “
