Mercury Online Festival 2020 Submission
swefn (Old English) – dream {noun}
“Imaginary events seen in the mind while sleeping.”
At Swefn’s Edge is formed by Essex based husband and wife team Michael Parker and Kate Millner who compose a variety of soundscapes, often weaving poetry/spoken word with music suitable for theatre, TV, film, gaming, meditative platforms and audio drama.
Michael is a professional musician, sound designer and composer. Kate is a storyteller, actress, singer and primary school teacher with a Degree in Art History and Drama.
Why do we want to be a part of the new Digital and Performance Festival?
Due to the lockdown, ASE has begun exploring new, accessible and interesting ways to present our music and to reach a wider audience, encouraged by The Mercury Creatives Programme, yet we feel that we have so much more to discover.
We are aware that we only at the beginning of the At Swefn’s Edge journey- we often feel like explorers- chipping away at our ‘work’- which excites us, and we’d very much like the opportunity to share our excitement with others.
We have just started to combine our music with more visual, filmic material which has allowed us to immerse a virtual audience in sound and visuals, but we also have so many more concepts up our sleeve that would combine story writing and telling, theatre, music, sound/ field recording (potentially binaural), animation, filmic projection and puppetry.
We believe that being a part of this innovative festival will push our boundaries, allow us to connect with an even broader audience through the different partners involved in the project and permit us to present our work through many different medium whilst celebrating the digital platform that we will be connecting through.
Our Proposal
At Swefn’s Edge would like to present a piece of multi-media storytelling entitled, The Gift Of Sarah.
The Story
This is a story, written by Kate that illustrates how one person can feel segregated from a community and how that individual offers self-sacrifice whilst enclosed in that environment, in order to benefit the community that shuns her. It deals with many human, moral and social values, almost in a religious or spiritual manner and is accessible to any age from 7 years upwards.
The story text can be found here. The audio of the spoken text, read by Kate, can be found here.
Our preliminary song theme sketch of Sarah, can be heard here.
Our ‘Performance' concept
We envisage that the completed film would run at approx. 30 mins.
It would be filmed in our Studio 2 at Studio 6 Music in Witham and would be an experiment in telling the story using different techniques – filmic projection, live retelling by Kate, pre-recorded audio, animation, shadow and hand puppetry, experimenting with the use of field recordings/sound (potentially binaural elements which are enhanced by the audience wearing headphones- the possibilities of this technique we are really beginning to love exploring in our work), and, of course our musical composition, driven by Michael, as the soundscape/soundtrack.
Alternative Ideas
If this submission sounds too long a piece for the Festival, we could do the same design of project with another story, The Wishing Star, which would be about 12 minutes also written by Kate (the text can be found here & the recording of the spoken text as audio to be found here); a 5 minute piece of a darker tale, The Odd Couple (text found here) OR we could devise something new, but using the same format as above as a collage of spoken word to run at your specified time.
Really it is up to you- let us know our time slot allocation and we would devise around it, but original spoken word would always be at it’s core.
We invite you now to explore our work and to join us At Swefn’s Edge…
so that At Swefn’s Edge can join you and other creatives in this wonderful innovative new Festival.
Our Work - Who are At Swefn's Edge?
Our website can be found at www.atswefnsedge.com which showcases all of our work to date.
Links to our Social Media can be found below