Going On Taw

Courage Copse Creatives

Going on Taw (GoT) is an18-month storytelling & poetry project that started in January 2023.

Katy Lee, Lead artist and Creative Producer swam, walked and canoed the Taw speaking to experts, gathering stories and working with seven different community groups. The community participants' thoughts and imaginings about the river were written on the canoe that Katy paddled down the Taw and have shaped the content, alongside her own writings and musings, for a live professional riverbank storytelling, poetry and music performance.

Katy worked with 172 participants from 4 primary school classes along the length of the River Taw, Barnstaple Memory Cafe, Barnstaple Youth Centre & ESOL students at Sunrise Diversity. A poetry pen-pal scheme was set up between the primary schools along the length of the Taw and with Sunrise Diversity; poems travelled up and down the river, gathering in size.

Seven podcasts and short films accompany the performance and were on view along with photographs and the Going on Taw canoe at the exhibition at the Museum of Barnstaple and North Devon, 18th May - 6th July 2024. Katy has worked with composer David Smale, filmmaker Jessica Pearson and photographer and canoe builder, Vince Large.

Review by Clare Gulliver 28/06/2024

Like the stroke of an oar, the rhythm of the word ‘river’ propels this wonderful performance poem from the Taw’s boggy beginnings through layers of landscape, legend and history before sweeping majestically out to the sea and the future.

Laden with prejudices, I had come ready to rail. Nature writing – if that’s what this is – can feel like a privileged discourse, removed from everyday reality. But Going On Taw definitely isn’t that. It eddies and pools as readily into social history and polemic as into folk tale and Romanticism. The Enclosures Act and South West Water appear alongside salmon, otters and witches’ familiars – the determination to remain present, engaged with the rivers’ thorny issues anchoring the relevance of the piece.

There are sections of sublime poetry – the slippery emergence of the Taw’s headwaters, for example; and bold boundary pushing – at one point the poet breaks with performance convention to invoke audience discomfort.

There were one or two moments where I felt left behind by the tide. It took a while for the personification of the Taw to coalesce in my mind’s eye. And I lost my grip during the speculative sequence near the end. Perhaps it was the rain. Or perhaps that’s the idea.

But what stays with me most is the physicality. Storytelling convention restricts – in movement, props, media. But Katy Lee walked, swam and canoed the course of the river to make this work. The embodied experience – the push and pull of the current, the exclusion, the fear for her own safety – bursts through into words and performance and elevates this piece to next level storytelling.

Going On Taw is a work to immerse yourself in, out of doors, in the elements, beside the River Taw if you can.