Karine Polwart and The Royal Lyceum Theatre Company are bringing critically acclaimed show, Wind Resistance to Perth Theatre from Tuesday 17 to Sunday 22 April.
Written, composed and performed by multi-award winning Karine Polwart, who was recently crowned Folk Singer of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, Wind Resistance combines folk influences and myth with social observations on matters including Donald Trump’s corporate megalomania and Charles Darwin’s family life.
Every autumn, two and a half thousand pink-footed geese fly from Greenland to winter at Fala Flow, a protected peat bog south-east of Edinburgh. From this windy plateau, Karine Polwart surveys the surrounding landscape through history, song, birdlore, and personal memoir. Ideas of sanctuary, maternity, goose skeins, Scottish football legend, and medieval medicine all take flight, in this compelling combination of story and song.
Karine Polwart is the four-time winner of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, twice for Best Original Song. Her most recent album, Traces, was shortlisted for both the Scottish Album of the Year Award and BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Album of the Year. Her debut solo album Faultlines won Best Album at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards back in 2005, following six years of touring as a traditional Scots singer with Malinky and Battlefield Band.
Karine Polwart said:
“I was lucky to attend the panto reopening of Perth Theatre in December, with my kids. It’s a beautiful, warm space, lovingly restored. And it’s perfect for conjuring the immersive sound, story, songs and skies of Fala Moor, the tiny Midlothian peat bog which is at the heart of Wind Resistance.
The pink-footed and greylag geese have only just flown north again to spend the summer in Iceland and Greenland. Wind Resistance is inspired by their return to Scotland in the autumn, and by the ways the geese protect and look out for one another in their skeins. It’s about what we can learn from them as humans struggling to protect the people and places that matter most to us.
I always want to know about the places I call home: who’s been here before? what lives here now? what needs looking out for? and what can I learn? Wind Resistance is all about that. In one small, unassuming place, there’s birdsong and myth, mosses and medieval medicine, football and modern midwifery. It sounds random. But it all connects.”
Director Wils Wilson said:
“I'm delighted that more people will get the chance to see this show, which remains both poetic and politically urgent.  It's a fantastic opportunity to work again with Karine's searing honesty and integrity as a performer - she casts a spell which is not soon forgotten.”