Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me

"I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass." - WG Sebald

An internal adventure of miniscule proportions, Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me studies the action of the Sea, both as mythology and as presence, and asks: why is it people are drawn to the Sea? Performing the destructive magnetism of The Sea using Cupola Bobber’s home-spun minimal aesthetic and poker-faced absurdist charm, the show builds a remarkably engaging exploration of how the Sea functions as a dwarfing muse of existential contemplation, a place of leisure, and as heartless destroyer. All this explored through the locations of British Edwardian seaside resorts and surrounding “work towns”, the disappeared sea-side town of Hallsands, the disappearing town of Dunwich, and 1930’s dust bowl Kansas. Using a multi-layered square tarp artfully manipulated to locate the performance in the sea, on the land, in the sky, and in the theater, and with inspiration from the performance duos of Laurel and Hardy and Gilbert and George, the duo Cupola Bobber create an insightful and rewarding multifarious pastiche full of intelligence, fortitude, generosity, and imaginative wit.

“Looking for machinery, we discovered the sea. We walked across the bay, and had to imagine the water; we went swimming in the sand. Looking for perspective, we found ourselves upside down. ‘...and so on and so on, picture after picture, incident after incident, a drifting panorama of ever changing, ever dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any help from me.’(Mark Twain)“ – Cupola Bobber

“Cupola Bobber can lay claim to a special talent for alternative performance making of disarmingly odd, cosmic charm.” - The Times of London

*Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me* is a National Performance Network Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Links Hall and PS122 in partnership with the National Performance Network. Major contributors of the National Performance Network are Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org.

Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me is co-produced by the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster (UK)

ARTIST WEBSITE:

http://cupolabobber.com/