THE SELKIE PROJECT
The Selkie Project is a new Australian work exploring gender roles, displacement, and inheritance, by re-examining the Celtic myth of the Selkie.
It follows the story of the Selkie, a seal-woman, displaced into an unfamiliar human world. Grotesquely animal, but trapped in the human roles of ‘woman’ and ‘mother’, she is an alien living on land and yearning for the sea. The work also traces the generational fracture created in her daughter, who lives and breathes the aftermath of this displacement, carrying the burden of the past.
A one woman show, the Selkie Project is a poetic collision of an old myth with contemporary experience, threaded by vast metaphoric imagery by Green Room Award winner Ivanka Sokol, and evocative sound design by Meta Cohen.
The Selkie Project is a new Australian work exploring gender roles, displacement, and inheritance, by re-examining the Celtic myth of the Selkie.
It follows the story of the Selkie, a seal-woman, displaced into an unfamiliar human world. Grotesquely animal, but trapped in the human roles of ‘woman’ and ‘mother’, she is an alien living on land and yearning for the sea. The work also traces the generational fracture created in her daughter, who lives and breathes the aftermath of this displacement, carrying the burden of the past.
A one woman show, the Selkie Project is a poetic collision of an old myth with contemporary experience, threaded by vast metaphoric imagery by Green Room Award winner Ivanka Sokol, and evocative sound design by Meta Cohen.
The Selkie Project is a poetic collision of an old myth with contemporary experience. A new Australian work, it combines a virtuosic one-woman performance with vast video imagery by Green Room Award winner Ivanka Sokol, and evocative sound design by Meta Cohen.
In part one the selkie, a seal-woman, is displaced into an unfamiliar human world. Grotesquely animal, but trapped in the wrong skins of ‘woman’ and ‘mother’, she is an alien living on land and yearning for the sea, to which she ultimately escapes, leaving her daughter behind.
In part two, the selkie's daughter, now adult, lives and breathes the aftermath of this displacement. Haunted by her mother’s departure and the generational memory of water, she finds release in alcohol and punk.
The work’s projected video images and sonic design realise these characters' distorted inner and external landscapes, often experienced as if through water: the mother consumed by the images and sounds of a foreign world; the daughter driven by a world of memories.
Photos by Lincoln Gidney
The Selkie Project was developed through Liminal Theatre’s unique somatic creative writing process, over several intensive workshops.
In March and December 2022, early developments explored the selkie myth through a landscape of text, images and sound. In March 2023, an exploratory draft script was presented and select sections were shown to an intimate audience of peers for feedback. In November 2023 a full performance, responding to previous feedback, was shown over 4 nights, to 120 friends and peers. The final performance will be built from this showing.
