An award winning commission for Dip Your Toe, Brighton Fringe, May 2012
Outside the Brighton Fishing Museum, throughout weekends in May 2012, there was a barnacle-encrusted booth – no doubt hauled from the sea by a team of salty sea dogs hoping it contained lost treasure. Instead, it contained a treasure-trove of shipwrecked memories: flotsam and jetsam from a thousand sea-stories…
‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!’
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter is an installation and performance in a carefully modified Victorian ‘bathing machine’ which uses object animation, light-and-shadow theatre, and puppetry – combined with a specially composed soundscape of words, music and ethereal sound… a brand-new puppetry, poetic drama, and sound-art piece that will reference fairytales, folk stories, legends and superstitions about the sea – from Mother Carey’s Chickens to sneezing sea monsters and sulking selkies, via mischievous merfolk, ancient mariners and more!
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter was commissioned for Dip Your Toe, Brighton Fringe, May 2012. It won Latest Theatre Awards: ‘Most Ground breaking act’ and ‘Star of the Festival’
The work was created by Grist to the Mill’s artistic director Isobel Smith, sculptor and performer/puppeteer, working in collaboration with writer/dramaturg Dorothy Max Prior, musician/composer James ‘Foz’ Foster, and visual artist/musician Chris Gilvan-Cartwright, with Daniel Clark, Earfilms, as the project’s Outside Ear.
Paul Harrison did the barnacles and wonderful paint effects. The special water effect was made by Alex at SFX.
Click here for **** 4 star review from The Independent
Click here for Being There feature in Total Theatre Magazine
Click here for Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter Programme
Click here for Salty Sea Dogs schools project
More about Dip Your Toe:
Dip Your Toe is a large-scale arts event, produced by the Nightingale with Brighton Fringe and The Marlborough Theatre, to celebrate the Maiden Voyage of Lone Twin’s The Boat Project. It saw the creation of six bespoke Victorian-style bathing machines, intimate new Brighton Fringe venues, in prime locations across the city in May 2012. See dipyourtoe.wordpress.com
