Ben Haggarty

REPERTOIRE:
The following listings represent major pieces within Ben’s current performance repertoire. Ben works both as solo artist and in collaboration – usually with accompanying musicians. Ben’s repertoire is ever expanding; he is available for commissions and can develop material for specific projects as required. Ben has a wide-ranging repertoire for performances and work in educational and community contexts and for site-specific work.

Solo performances:
Fairytales for Grown-Ups
Full-blooded, romper-stomper wonder tales exploring, with passion and humour, the balance of life, death, love, betrayal and forgiveness.The title says it all…

Mr Sandmann
Master of Improvisation and internationally renowned for his dynamic performances, Ben Haggarty slips behind the bright lights into the dark side of fairground, where you risk getting more than you bargained for. This intense, physical and alarming performance journeys through the am bivalent mythology of the sandman. Drawing on urban legend, fairytale and folklore, and paying oblique homage to Heinrich Von Kleist, ETA Hoffman, Hans Anderson and Nick Cave, Ben Haggarty surrenders his sanity to the magnetic pull of a ravenous moon.

Dysfunction
A combined programme of stories of dysfunction in families and family relationships – challenging, and dangerous - yet life affirming.

The Life and Loves of Fionn MacCumhaill
Ben Haggarty has spent twenty years amassing a vast repertoire of stories about the ancient Irish hero, Fionn MacCumhaill. These are stories of high romance, humour, magic and tragedy

Mid-Winters Tales
A seasonal programme of folk and fairytales for the winter months...

The Iron Man Kavad
Inspired by the painted storytelling boxes of India, The Iron Man Kavad is a performance of a powerful Hungarian wondertale using an ever-expanding box of pictures. This delightful show is best programmed for smaller spaces and more intimate audiences.

The Blacksmith at the Bridge of Bones
If 'knowledge equals power' then the vivid imagery and haunting ideas contained in this set of traditional tales will leave you wondering about the nature and responsibility of such power.

The Daughter of The King of the Dawn.
A performance of utterly startling, wondrous, and mighty tales about initiations on the quest for knowledge and the journey from innocence to experience.

Collaborations:
Gilgamesh
Acclaimed storyteller Ben Haggarty is joined by Greek percussionist and Ney player, Manya Maratou, to tell their version of the great Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh. This age old story raises questions which resonate through society to the present day - exploring tyranny, the search for eternal life, the threat of apocalypse and the secrets of the gods.

Beauty and the Beast and other tales for Lovers of the Rose
What really happened in that fairytale forest where the merchant lost his way? Acclaimed performance storyteller, Ben Haggarty joins forces with musician Sherry Robinson, to tell a seemingly familiar story in a powerful new way. This brooding, multi-layered version of an ancient tale will creep into your waking dream and haunt you with its beauty… just as it has countless generations before. A full-blooded programme of dark love stories and music: romantic, rich, full of exquisite joy and pain - just like the real thing.

Frankenstein
Enter a world of feverish collective dreaming, as performance storyteller, Ben Haggarty, and musician and singer, Sianed Jones, present an intense ‘Steam Punk’ interpretation of Mary Shelley’s modern myth. Through music and voice, two masters of improvisation use our fascination with the grotesque to explore the nature of the consciousness of a man made by man and the responsibility of the creator towards the created. Truly a story for our times, Frankenstein speaks in lurid and bold terms of power unleashed, the loneliness of separation and our fear of the unknown.

The Fly or Midir and Eadoin -The love of one thousand years
10th century science fiction, come Irish epic, come fantasy, come horror strip, come passion play…A story of the intense, destructive and transformative nature of beauty and love, delving deep into the darkness of the ‘other world’. A blinding combination of soundscapes that occasionally burst into song and an intensely physical performance from Ben Haggarty, as he works his magic on the audience’s imagination. A performance to literally raise the roof…

The Three Snake Leaves
An exploration of the dark heart of the Grimms stories, with the Company of Storytellers Hugh Lupton and Sally Pomme Clayton


For Families:
Eaten Father, Eaten Mother
A terrifying show for children aged 8 plus, with Musician, Sianed Jones (Voice, Electric and Acoustic Violin, Harmonium, Bass)

Maria Morevna or How Prince Ivan got a Horse
A whole-hearted adventure story, with marriage, magic, a monster, a warrior princess captured against her will and a dangerous rescue mission by Ivor – but only after he’s found an appropriate horse.

Tales for Days of the Dead
(solo or with TUUP) A seasonal show for the 1st and 2nd November Two master storytellers, Ben Haggarty and TUUP, celebrate the Mexican festival of the Dias de Los Muertos and its traditions of honouring dead ancestors, by telling tales that mock, defy and salute Death. Join them as they dance hand-in-hand with that dynamic trio: God, the Devil and Death

Lost in the Forest of Bells
Since 2001 Ben Haggarty has been the official storyteller with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble - which has seen him research hundreds of stories from the countries traversed by ancient trade routes from Eastern Europe to the Far East. Here, translocated into his own imagined landscape, ‘The Forest of Bells’, are Ben’s performances of raw and magical stories from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia. Join him for close encounters of the forest kind…

In preparation:
Faust...

‘This is real storytelling ’
Hay Literary Festival (for Frankenstein)

‘Haggarty tells his stories with enormous relish and gusto’
The Independent

‘Haggarty’s telling is an adroit mixture of the imposingly epic and the reassuringly rhythmic, tempered by a twinkle that admits to the story’s heightened nature, without mocking it.****’
The Times

‘... and what a story this one was - not a simple one of unwitting, but a playful one that unravelled itself mischievously in Haggarty’s quietly skilful telling.’
The New Statesman

‘I was spellbound – I don’t use the word lightly – as Ben turned the austere lecture theatre around us into a flickering cave of wonder’
The Times

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