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Colchester

Dolcoath

A WILDWORKS Production travelling through Britain and France, 2006-2007

Orpheus is returning home from war. The village is being decorated with bunting, and the "welcome home" banner has been raised. The band is playing, the choir singing and the vicar is handing out cake. But celebration turns to tragedy when Orpheus’ wife, Eurydice, is killed in a terrible accident. Refusing to accept his wife's fate, and believing that love is stronger than death, Orpheus sets off into the Underworld to find his lover and bring her back from Hades, Lord of Death, who owns all and returns nothing. And we are going with him........

In 2006-2007 WILDWORKS went on a journey with Souterrain which involved partnerships and performances in seven very different communities in Brighton, Hastings, Gosnay, Amiens, Colchester, Sotteville-les-Rouen and Cornwall.

At each venue we brought the show to life in a new way, working with new volunteers, adding new skills, narrative and meaning to the existing work.

We worked with ballroom dancers in Hastings, young bikers in Gosnay and a gospel choir in Amiens.

We performed Souterrain to great acclaim in seven different underworlds:

A village, a school, a 17th century French convent, a Napoleonic citadel, a department store, an Alzheimers hospital and a disused mine.

Souterrain explored themes of love, loss and regeneration. These themes resonated with our host communities who had said goodbye to their traditional industries, their countries of birth, their memory…

We asked the audience to leave their most precious memories in the care of the angels of death during their journey through the underworld.

This extraordinary archive of the human heart, now amounting to over 10,000 memories, was exhibited at the V&A Museum in 2008. It is expected it will continue on its journey.

The return of Wildworks' site-specific promenade show inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is well worth celebrating. It's a work of wonder and integrity that uses a choir as a Greek chorus and which is so open that it demands that the audience bring their own grief. Wildworks shows are always grounded in the community in which it is made and these shows on a disused mining site should be a moving reminder of a disappeared way of life that cannot be brought back from the dead and the importance of rituals in learning to say goodbye. Lyn Gardner, July 2007, The Guardian Preview.

This production seems to cry out to the hills, to find a way of saying goodbye that offers solace. Full of images that linger long after you leave, and shot through with tenderness, humanity and unexpected comedy, this is unmissable, immensely cheering theatre about some of the saddest corners of life. Elisabeth Mahoney, Wednesday July 18th, 2007 The Guardian *****