The Sailmaker's Palm
This is a story about salt and sails, about the persistence of mystery, transmutation and transcendence. It is an allegorical tale told through music, dance, costume and words. It follows a sailmaker and a salter on a journey to find a release from the structures and strictures of their lives.
Sail making and salt panning have both been very vital crafts for coastal communities. Salt was essential for survival, helping to preserve food during winter months and maintaining a basic level of health and cleanliness. Sails allowed people to catch the wind and use its power to fish and trade and travel, linking communities in areas where travel by land was difficult and dangerous.
The Sailmaker’s Palm is a discussion of boundaries, looking and the tensions between differing states of awareness. Salt, water and air have cycled through changes across the geology of our Earth for years without number. Humanity is part of that cycle, the water and minerals in our body are what life is made from.
The Ecdysis Project & The Scales Of The World
A compelling and emotive story, an invitation to let the scales fall from your eyes, an altered reality of unique costume, visceral dance, visual poetry, and powerful music. We offer you a moment to consider your place in the world through a process of revelation, rebelion and reinvention.
Music – Consummate singer and performer Breezy Lee interweaves her vocal power and emotive eloquence with
the brilliantly lean and haunting sounds of composer Richard Luke. The show features Breezy Lee singing live alongside
an orchestrated string ensemble.
Costume – Revered international couturier Mr Pearl brings three fabulous creations to the show, working in
tandem with Alex Rigg to present to you a transcendental costume experience. The pieces are unique and visually
arresting, they need to be seen to be beleived.
Dance – Oceanallover dance with a conviction born of poetic eloquence. Their movements grow out of the ground
and rain down upon you from the sky. The company are working alongside the idiosynchratic Bill Coleman, dancer and
choreographer from Toronto whose award winning work has been shown across the world.
Writing – The Scales Of The World is a timeless allegory written with music, dance, costume and words. The story
is narrated and sung live and woven into the structure of the show. Writing and words are at the heart of the work of
Oceanallover’s Artistic Director Alex Rigg who has been making and performing his visceral poetry for forty years.
The Self Assembled
The Self Assembled is a project that is designed as a celebration of life, bringing people together to be creative and inspired.
A couple of years ago I had a dream in which I was wandering about in a large and complicated interior space. I became lost and disorientated, finally arriving in a vast hall filled with people. Everyone had their possessions laid out on the ground or on rails for other people to buy or just take away. In the middle of this hubbub one young man was struggling to get his belongings organised, and to even comprehend why he was there. I spoke to him and offered to help him find a way to the outside world, as I had earlier glimpsed a door that might lead to away from the building. He was pleased to find some kind of help and we travelled together through a maze of corridors and fire-doors. I became lost again and some time later I caught sight of the young man chatting happily with some friends. I awoke without finding an exit.
I later had the impression that the young man represented my own confusions and that his quest to both organise and share his many possessions was what I needed to do next in my life.
I probably have hundreds of pieces of costume that I have made over the last few years for various projects. Some of them are better made than others, the earlier pieces are more glued than sewn. They are all fairly odd, possibly unique. I do use these costumes as a resource for my own work, but in reality they are mostly gathering dust, or waiting for moth, mouse or mould to find them, which will eventually happen.
And so I devised a project in which this resource is made available to other artistic collaborators, (musicians, dancers, poets, actors, technical crew, front of house staff……) and simultaneously available to the audience. It would be a giant dressing up box, providing a catalyst for the generation of fantasy and fantastical notions.
The Self Assembled invites everyone to become transfigured and to suspend disbelief, entering an alternative reality together.
I have shown two pilot versions of the project in Glasgow and am now looking for suggestions and partnerships that could make this project available to other communities.
Kroovan Wings
Kroovan Wings is a homage to trees. Gaelic craobh (pronounced kroov) means ‘tree’. It is a celebration of two magnificent trees in particular that stand at the gateway to the Galloway Forest Park and at a meeting point on the Southern Upland Way below Culmark Hill. This is an outdoor performance project that uses dance, song, costume and storytelling to discuss what it is to be a tree.
Near where Oceanallover has its studio on the edge of the Galloway Forest Park there are two trees, an ash and a sycamore; both trees produce seeds that have wings (Samara fruit). The trees are growing one on either side of the road to St John’s Town of Dalry and alongside the Southern Upland Way. Both trees are about two hundred and fifty years old and stand alone and together, surrounded by upland grazing. This project is both about and for these trees.
