Festival Shorts: WYRM 2.0

Event Details
Cast & Crew

19:30-20:30, Saturday 28th June 2025

Alphabetti Theatre

Music, Words, Performance: Harkling

This event is part of Festival Shorts, also including Opera du Mal, Acrimonia, and Escape Room Opera.

🐉 WYRM 2.0 is an emerging ecofeminist opera-performance reawakening the ancient Northumbrian tale of the Laidly Wyrm through myth, memory, and sound. Rooted in local folklore and drawn from the artist’s own heritage, this one-woman piece explores wildness, resistance, and collective remembering.

The full story is still taking shape, but unfolds across two timelines: In the 6th century, a wise Shepherdess encounters a wyrm — a great scaled beast, once a princess, transformed not by curse but by secret ritual. As civil unrest and ecological collapse spread, the wyrm is scapegoated by rulers who fear her power. The Shepherdess recognises the wyrm’s healing nature and enshrines her energy in a golden talisman, planting a ritual across time.

Centuries later, a modern-day Archaeologist uncovers the talisman — and must decide whether to complete the ritual before memory is lost forever. This scratch performance shares early material from the work in development, including one of the Shepherdess’ arias — inspired in part by the Scandinavian herding call Kulning/Kulokk — and fragments exploring the wyrm’s terrain: shifting landscapes of breath, distortion, memory, and myth. WYRM 2.0 combines live voice, hand-built electronics, and raw field recordings from Northumbrian landscapes to create a sound world that is both ancient and futuristic.

Rooted in the body, the breath, and the handmade, Harkling’s work draws on thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and Ursula K. Le Guin, fusing storytelling, ritual, and experimental music into an intimate, raw, and resonant experience.