‘A deeply emotional piece. Charming and witty. Enchanting and delicate. So clearly told, like a memory of another time. Another life within us all.’ (words from the audience)

How would you sense the world if you were…a mollusc? How would you love, live and express yourself?

The Spiral combines physical theatre, storytelling, folk song, and immersive electronic soundscapes by sound artist Kerry Priest, to tell this unusual story. From the primordial ocean of five hundred million years ago, a shapeless mollusc speaks to you, human inhabitants of today’s world, to ‘remind’ you what it was like to begin to discover sensation, emotions, motions and self-hood. As it creates the spiralling coils of its first shell, it sings of its love and struggle for self-expression, imagines its evolution into the multiform species that inhabit our world and warns us of its (our) impending extinction.

Inspired by the short story from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, this absurd piece takes you on an imaginative journey, searching for a sense of identity and belonging through the unlikely perspective of a self-conscious extra-sensitive wet pulp!

This show was developed with the support of Theatre Royal Plymouth’s EXPERIMENT strand of Artist Development (2025) and the Northcott Reclaim festival (2024).

Soundscapes were recorded as part of a SOAK Lab event run by SOAK Live Art CIC in collaboration with Sarah Blissett, Jodie Saunders and Emma Welton with IAA funding from the University of Plymouth.