aaaa nordhavn, Copenhagen
Leo Elia
The Tin Man Monologue is the second chapter in Leo Elia’s Companion Cycle, following The Scarecrows of Saskan (2025), which was presented at aaaa nordhavn in 2025. Each chapter pairs a character from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with their counterpart from the Soviet adaptation The Wizard of the Emerald City, using semi-animatronic theater to examine nostalgia, authoritarianism, and the lingering cultural afterlife of the Cold War.
Set moments before Dorothy and the Scarecrow encounter him in the forest, the work unfolds as a rusted Tin Man’s solitary monologue. Drawing on the Soviet translation’s transformation of the character into an iron lumberjack (because tin doesn’t actually rust) the musical circles questions of labor, inheritance, and obsolescence as he compulsively interrogates the material he is made of.
The piece shows three successive versions of the Tin Man emerging from one another. The Soviet Tin Man breaks out of the shell of the original Tin Man. From within the Soviet figure, a third, more skeletal and robotic version emerges, with LED screens in place of eyes. Each earlier body remains behind as an empty shell, and birds have begun nesting in the hollow eye sockets of the abandoned forms.