Stone’s Throw: Lament of the Selkie

A performance of song, story and visual image, blurring the lines between real life and fiction: Two women. Two mothers. Many stories… riding tides of trauma and loss, to find the skin that fits. Singer-songwriter Rachel Taylor-Beales’ highly acclaimed ?Stone’s Throw, Lament Of The Selkie’ album, is now mesmerisingly interwoven with her own dark journey through injury and birth trauma, alongside a contemporary reimagining of an ancient selkie myth. At 24 weeks pregnant, sporting a huge bump and on tour in rural Italy Rachel’s world came crashing to a halt, as the result of a serious accident… And then she met Selkie, an enigmatic creature, a mother with a tortured past. Reality blurs as Rachel and Selkie walk the line where the ocean meets the land and back again, their two separate stories entwining and unraveling together. The performance combines breathtaking music, songs, spoken-word and storytelling against a backdrop of large-scale visual projections and bespoke verbatim recordings of women’s birth stories and broader thoughts on identity. This show is an intimate, stirring, but ultimately uplifting exploration of the ongoing process of rebuilding and reclaiming oneself after an experience of trauma.

Seligman Theatre