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Merging folk tales, dance and song the show tells two very different stories of hope, connected by the journey of the migrating swallow. Sisi from rural Ciskei longs to see her older brother who has left to travel north, telling her letters to him to a swallow, because "hope is swift, and flies on swallows’ wings". Woven into this is the story of Tommy Bell a blacksmith in north-east England who until the miners’ strike was a farrier and shod the pit ponies which hauled trucks along the shafts in pitch blackness. After the strike, when the mines were shut down, his way of life and that of the mining communities came to an end. The ghosts of the past still haunt him, but it is in a simple memory of the ponies running free as they share the summer air with the swallows that he begins to understand how his anger and disappointment are tying him to the shadow of the past.
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