We Shine Portsmouth 2022: Octopuses and other Sea Creatures takes its audience into the deep

Octopuses and Other Sea Creatures is an immersive multi-media event, set at Portsmouth Cathedral in High Street, Old Portsmouth, which takes its audience from the surface world and down into the depths for an encounter with the creatures who live there.

Inspired by Octopus Medicine, a collection of verse-stories written by poet and performer Becci Louise, it is the culmination of years of work by its dedicated creative team: Roy Hanney, Angela Parks, Rusty Sheriff, Kim Balouch, Thomas Buckley, Joe Hufton, Leonardo Lami, and VEL.

Through clever use of video, a rich musical score and readings, the audience gets to hear about the relationship between humanity and those who dwell in the sea. There are also several ‘dens’ for people to explore and have encounters in ‘kelp’ beds and with a deep sea diver played by professional actor, Mark Wingett who grew up in Portsmouth. A keen diver, he is known for his roles in The Who’s rock-opera Quadrophenia, as well as The Bill, EastEnders and many other major shows.

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Creative director Roy Hanney said: ‘The origin of this all came about and was inspired by this little book of poems by Becci. We have this view of the octopus is that it’s a monster and all of our literature is about that and that it’s threatening, and people say things like it looks like an alien from another planet.

‘We wanted to follow that idea in her poems, where she took the octopus’s point of view and we are the monsters. That was the inspiration here, to take people under the sea, to meet the octopus, and it’s not necessarily a happy meeting, we haven’t necessarily finished this conversation yet. But we want people to come away going, actually the octopus could be a companion, it could be a friend. And of course the octopus is a metaphor for nature – we should be a friend of nature, we should be a companion of nature, not something to fight and control all the time.

‘The fact that Portsmouth is built on the sea, we should be working on that. There’s important stuff there about how we have a relationship with the sea, but maybe that relationship needs to change.’

And Roy praised We Shine for giving projects like this a platform: ‘There are a group of people here in the city who’ve been doing audio-visual art and installations and gigs for quite a while and what We Shine does is give us an opportunity to play much bigger and to have a home for that. What we’re doing now because of We Shine and the Arts Council money, is so much “more”, in terms of quality. All of the artists involved in this have day jobs – it’s not a hobby, it’s more committed and passionate than that.’

Octopuses has been funded by Arts Council England, sponsored by Articulate Sage Limited and produced by one000plateaus.

Free tickets for the event were quickly snapped up, but there will be at least 40 tickets available each night for walk ups.

Performances take place at 7.30pm on Thursday and Friday and 5pm, 6.30pm and 8pm on Saturday.