WULF
Director / Choreographer Maisie Newman
Composer / Writer Rowan Evans
Associate Artist / Script Supervisor Celine Lowenthal
Film Artist Jack Offord
Designer Hannah Wolfe
Producer Christabel Holmes
WULF is a new interdisciplinary performance by Fen, a powerful exhibition of emerging dance-theatre with a monolithic original score, bilingual poetry and eerily beautiful projection and film. Performed by a chorus of five women, WULF is a dark feminist adaptation of the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’, one of only two in the language to be written from a female perspective. A compelling display of visceral female strength and myth-making, the performance reveals fragments of a woman’s journey through separation, wilderness, birth and sacrifice. Fen use field recordings from the flooded landscape of the Avalon Marshes, Somerset, to form WULF’s pulsing environment, combining film projection with immersive sound design and powerful original music. “Epic, ritualistic and archetypal” (audience member, Ferment Fortnight), WULF is a timeless and haunting myth of human collision with the wilderness.
Fen is a collaboration between director/ movement director/ digital artist Maisie Newman, poet / composer Rowan Evans and other Bristol-based artists. We are a new company that brings together a collaboration of innovative theatre-makers and artists from across the South West, producing exciting and challenging work embedded in the shared cultural and natural heritage of our region. Fen undertook a two week Research and Development period in for WULF in November / December 2016, supported by Arts Council England and Bristol Old Vic Ferment. A work-in-progress performance took place at Ferment Fortnight in January 2017.
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Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre.
Fæst is þæt eglond, fenne biworpen.
Sindon wælreowe weras þær on ige;
willað hy hine aþecgan gif he on þreat cymeð.
Ungelice is us. [...]
*
Wulf is on one island, I on another.
That island is secure, surrounded by fen.
There are bloodthirsty men on the island.
They will consume him if he comes into their troop.
It is different with us. [...]
[from 'Wulf and Eadwacer' in The Exeter Book, Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501]
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