Local artist’s lockdown phenomena comes to the Merlin Theatre

LOCAL artist, Liv Torc, is bringing her lockdown art project to the stage next week at the Merlin.

‘Haiflu Ever After’ – inspired by Liv’s ‘Project Haiflu’- uses, photography, personal story, live music and film to tell the social history of the last 18 months during the pandemic.

Promoters say, “Project Haiflu was one of the runaway creative success stories of 2020 and 2021. Created by poet and artist Liv Torc, it wove together crowd-sourced haiku (a type of short form poetry originally from Japan), photography and music to tell a week-by-week creative social history of our lives during one of the biggest crises of the last 100 years.

“From a simple request on Facebook, Haiflu ended up engaging over 10,000 people. It was featured on the Radio 4 Today Programme and became ‘Word of the Week’ in The Times and Sunday Times.

“During the course of the project, Liv made 23 short films, featuring contributions from over 500 citizen artists, selected from tens of thousands of entries. Now thanks to the Arts Council England, Haiflu is going on tour with a full-length show that tells the story of the project, alongside Liv’s own personal life and death journey of 2020. Audience members will be invited to write their own haiflu as part of the show – so the story keeps growing and we all get to be part of the art.

‘Haiflu Ever After’ comes to the Merlin Theatre next week on Wednesday 22 September – book tickets online: at www.merlintheatre.co.uk or call the Box Office on 01373 465949.