Fishing for Haiku
 

In 2025, I directed a new show for MishMash Productions, which is now being completed ahead of touring in June and autumn 2026. The piece is built around Paul Wiancko’s American Haiku, a beautiful, vivid and exhilarating work for viola and cello.
 

In the show, the performers go “fishing” for haiku poems, discovering them among the audience before bringing them to life through music, text and movement. Alongside Wiancko’s music, they share stories and tunes from their own homelands and family histories — France and Scotland — inviting the audience to connect with them not only as musicians, but as people.
 

What begins as a calm and gentle fishing trip gradually grows stranger and wilder, culminating in a folk tale about the devil making people dance endlessly. The show ends in a moment of quiet magic, as the individual pieces of the haiku “fish” are strung together to create one whole fish: a playful image of how fragments of language, music and memory can come together to make something complete.