About Mermaid Spring

Mermaid

Mermaid Spring is a new work of interdisciplinary music theatre focused on deep co-creation, slow process & social handcraft.

Our story is loosely inspired by Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida –– a real-life natural attraction where since 1947, women have worked as professional mermaids. The story follows professional mermaids and tourism workers hustling to hold on to their dream jobs in natural landscapes that are threatened by development.

From our vantage point in the Pacific Northwest, Florida is chimeric; an unlikely land of working mermaids and orchid smugglers, vanishing plume birds and nursery-bred palm trees, gator wrestlers and engineered swamps. As in British Columbia’s lower mainland, Florida’s unique landscapes and climate inspire environmentally destructive and gentrifying land-use projects. Astonishing ecosystems exist as unsettling hybrids with tacky tourism, development schemes, and agro-business selling nostalgia for what they will soon displace.

Spring

Set between pleasure and panic, Mermaid Spring asks: how is our enjoyment of a place complicit in its destruction?

Mermaid Spring in co-creation by designer and performance maker Kyla Gardiner, writer Barbara Adler and musical director/producer James Meger, featuring compositions by Peggy Lee, Leah Abramson and Alicia Hansen. 

Amanda Sum, Ashley Aron, Julia Ulehla and Dom Wakeland perform as Largo, Royal, Lana and Sugarloaf. Heather Cameron is our resident textile artist and mentor. Reed Jackson is our long time collaborator on moving image design and concept.  DD Kugler and Heidi Taylor have provided script and process dramaturgy.