POLLY TISDALL
ICARUS IN BRISTOL
Meet Pasiphae: a socialite with a rural past striving for fame as a Lady Boxer.
Minos: a Bristol MP and energy tycoon hoping to leave behind a glittering legacy.
Naucrate: a domestic cleaner trying to make a home in this port city that is not hers.
And Daedalus: an up and coming designer determined to make a name for himself on the River Severn.
Longing for an heir, Minos adopts a strange creature from a travelling circus and commissions Daedalus to design a home for it in his labyrinthine mine. When Naucrate and Daedalus’ son, Icarus, wanders into the mine and befriends 'The Little Bull Boy' the two children begin making a pair of wings to take them up and away.
A radical re-imagining of an ancient Greek myth for an industrial age, ICARUS IN BRISTOL asks how, when the worst happens, we can move beyond breakdown to recovery: reaching across dividing lines to build our own set of wings.
Polly is currently developing the script for ICARUS IN BRISTOL with support from The RCS Innovation Studio and NCACE.
You can read about her explorations with community gardeners, supported by NCACE here.
The project is a development of Polly's 2013 exploration of the Icarus story, Bright Child: Icarus Reforged.
Contact Polly for more information about the project here.