The Polar Poets were delighted to make an appearance this month in the picturesque Salt Building in Saltaire. And the September sunshine did buff up that golden stone beautifully. We were performing our show Arctic-ulate for the British Science Festival but managed to combine this with an event at the annual festival in Saltaire, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
A few snaps from our album will show you what we got up to. Here we've arrived early for our technical set-up - the car boot stacked with lap-top, projector, cables, screen, Cd player, tripod etc. And then there were the props! Though the heat made woolly hats and Arctic costumes out of the question ...
It was lovely to be working together again and the Salt Cafe proved an ideal venue with a decent stage area and excellent acoustics.
Our 'multi-media' show 'Arctic-ulate', is inspired by our travels to the Arctic and weaves story, music, poems and images together in a performance that takes our audience on a journey to polar regions and even out to space ...
For us as poets, it's great to be able to play with two voices and bring to life some of the characters and even arctic creatures of our poems. We were lucky to have a very warm and enthusiastic audience at Saltaire. In our final question and answer session, there were questions about the effects of climate change on reindeer, what it felt like to stand at the crater of an Icelandic volcano and what can we learn from the mini-Ice Age of the sixteenth century - we love it when we get out audience thinking!
So far, many of our shows seem to have been performed in the steamy heat of summer - or what's left of it. But we're looking forward enormously to a December outing for our next gig and a return to the gorgeously Gothic John Ryland Library in Manchester. Autumn is already nibbling around the edges. I'm just waiting for those first fingers of frost pinching the cheeks some morning soon ...
