For the We Shine Portsmouth festival of light one000plateaus delivered Octopuses & Other Sea Creatures, an immersive audio-visual spectacular for three nights at Portsmouth Cathedral. We saw over 1000 people of all ages through the experience and received an amazing response from those to attended one of the shows. All of our archive including the show video, podcasts and audio poems has been uploaded and can be easily accessed. So, now is the time to reflect on what has been a close to two and half year journey.
Originally staged as part of the New Theatre Royal’s Festival of the Sea in February 2019 at the Square Tower. The project was the brainchild of John Sackett a cultural events producer who is well known in the city as the producer of The Front Room. In addition to presenting monthly spoken word evenings, John had been inspired by the poetry of Becci Louise and in particular her Octopus Medicine anthology of verse-stories. Taking this original staging of the story as a starting point the creative team returned to the original poems. They started to ask new questions about our relationship to the sea and how they could engage with the people of Portsmouth to devise of a new version of the story.
Once we had received funding for the project from Arts Council England, Octopus Story started with BookFest in early 2022 opening with a Front Room Words & Music launch event, the release of a series of poem-casts featuring Becci Louise reading from Octopus Medicine p[roduced by Simon Shinfield and Paul Stevens, a series of Young Peoples Creative Writing workshops facilitated by Becci Louise in partnership with Portsmouth Libraries Service, and a one-day Transmedia Writing workshop led by story guru Alison Norrington and local author Matt Wingett. The project then went on to place scientists and artists together in schools to run a series of workshops looking at the pollution we don’t see. Facilitated by Padmodzi Creatives these workshops included contributions from My Friendly Planet, Seekers Create and Splodge Designs and saw the young people create work that then contributed to an exhibition at St Mary’s Church, Fratton. Called Before it’s Too Late the exhibition celebrated World Ocean Day and included spoken word presentations, dance, music, and a talk from a real-life aquarist (an octopus keeper to the layperson) Stacy Tonkin. Following this event, the team then put on a two-day creative discovery weekend at Groundlings Theatre which saw members of the public doing creative workshops in sonic art with Rusty Sheriff, video art with Thomas Buckley and Kim Balouch, and immersive theatre with Joe Hufton as part of our devising process.
For the conclusion of the project the creative team delivered Octopuses & Other Sea Creatures and took the audience on a journey deep undersea to experience the magic of the ocean, explore its depths, and meet the Octopus. The journey was narrated through spoken word and challenged the audience to rethink their relationship to the oceans and to reconsider the octopus, not as a monster from the deep, but as a companion species, as a co-inhabitant of this planet. The video was created for the show by Kim Balouch, while the sound design was by Rusty Sheriff, the octopus dens were facilitated by Leonardo Lami, the diver was ably played by actor Mark Wingett, with Roy Hanney of one000plateaus producing and Angela Parks backing us all up with some excellent project management, while we were thoughtfully mentored through the process by theatre director Joe Hufton of November Club.
There were numerous others involved in the process, too many to mention but a big thank you goes out to the team at Portsmouth Cathedral, the technical and creative team at Visual Elements for their incredible support and encouragement, Neil Broom and his wonderful team of students from Solent University, all the volunteers from Portsmouth University, and of course, Portsmouth Creates for inviting us to be part of We Shine Portsmouth 2023. The list goes on and of course, we can’t name everyone who took part but thank you anyway. You can read more about the project and all the different outcomes on the Octopus Story website and there is also a lot of material to see online. Just follow the links below to our archived content.
Listen to the audio poem-casts of Becci Louise reading from Octopus Medicine.
Listen to the Songs of the Octopus audio-poems on Bandcamp.
Take a look at the photos from the Octopuses & Other Sea Creatures
Watch the entire show audio and video edited together (47 mins duration)
