Welsh legend hits the mark with Welsh audiences and defies the Beast from the East!

Having reached the half way stage in Dreaming the Night Field’s Welsh tour, which pauses now until April 2019 (look out for spring dates announcement coming soon), last week we headed to Dorset for three rescheduled dates marking the grand finale of our three-year Arts Council England funded Strategic Touring programme, presenting epic stories with music from different cultures throughout the country.  Our programme began with Fire in the North Sky all the way back in 2015 and we’ll be publishing the low down on our last three years very soon… Dreaming the Night Field toured extensively in England last year, and this autumn we couldn’t wait to find out how Welsh audiences would react to the show and particularly to the brand new Welsh language version. We weren’t disappointed as once again audiences in venues right across Wales from Caernarfon to Carmarthen received the show with heartwarming reactions and heartfelt applause, absolutely loving hearing their ancient stories presented by our three talented artists. Here’s some of the feedback we received on this tour…

“I’ve seen shows about the Mabinogion before, on the telly and live, and I’ve never really got it… until tonight. This is storytelling of the highest order. I’ve always thought the Mabinogion was something quite complicated and difficult, but this isn’t, it’s just magical." “It is magical, I feel quite transfixed by it, really riveted and the music is so beautiful!"

We also received some great feedback from audiences that attended the BSL interpreted performance at Theatr Soar in Merthyr Tydfil:

What a fantastic night, I attended one of my first visits to a theatre to see a play. Wow it was fantastic! ‘Dreaming the Night Field’- a Welsh legend.’. Thank you, Cathryn Haulwen McShane, who translated Welsh into BSL just for me, for the whole night. I loved it! Wow!

Our three artists were also involved in a bit of a media frenzy whilst out on tour, attracting a feature in the Welsh language publication, Golwg, a double page feature in the Western Mail plus appearances on Shân Cothi's BBC Radio Cymru show, via an encounter with a dalek... and a big piece on S4C's Heno (Tonight) programme! In March, we (and much of the rest of the country) were roundly defeated from finishing our run by the ‘Beast from the East’, and the climate didn’t quite let us off the hook this time, unleashing, as one promoter put it, the ‘Pest from the West’.  Hail, thrashing winds and fierce downpours couldn’t keep hundreds of audience members away though, and they swept into the gorgeous village halls of Wootton Fitzpaine and Winterbourne Stickland to welcome us to Thomas Hardy country, followed by a fantastic finale event in Exeter Phoenix’s main theatre – a thrilling end to a fine sequence of shows. We received a lovely review from one of the South West rural dates, painting the scene for the show in the beautiful Arts and Crafts Village Hall in Wootton Fitzpaine perfectly, you can read the review here. Next up, we’re planning some extra special projects for 2019, we’ll share news with you as soon as we’ve finished forging the final touches... Here’s a look back at some of the picture of the Dreaming the Night Field crew on tour across Wales. [envira-gallery id="10009"] And for now we would like to thank everyone that has been involved in making the Dreaming the Night Field tours in England and Wales such a success - the three artists, our brilliant technician Gethin Stacey and the rest of the 'on tour' team, all the venues and promoters, funders - Arts Council England and Arts Council of Wales through the National Lottery, co-commissioners Felin Uchaf, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Cardiff University School of Welsh, supporters Aberystwyth Storytelling Festival and Beyond the Border Storytelling Festival and of course, all the audience members that came out, whatever the weather, to see the show!