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Stories, spells, songs – The Mighty Goddess show!
“Fiery, thrilling, powerful storytelling,” Bloomsbury Festival Electrifying, soulful storytelling for adults only! Pioneering storyteller Sally Pomme Clayton evokes powerful goddesses from across the globe. These feminist retellings are sly, subversive and spectacular and put goddesses in the centre of narratives about lust, desire, death, destruction, transformation and rebirth. Follow the goddess: creator, virgin, lover, mother, warrior, crone. Meet: Vesta the fiery virgin; Cybele the mother goddess who fathered a child; Ishtar Goddess of Love and War who journeys to the Land of the Dead. Sally Pomme Clayton entwines myths with memories, spells with songs, comedy with ceremony. She brings ancient myths to contemporary life with dynamic spoken-word, strange musical sounds,…
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What’s on
Once upon a Time24 September 2026, 7.30am – 9.30amWrite and Shine, Westminster Quaker Meeting HouseTICKETSEnter the enchanted forest with Sophie Herxheimer and Sally Pomme Clayton. Together we will explore how time is experienced and portrayed in fairytales and myths, and share examples from our own work and other poets and writers who hide amongst the trees and glades. We will draw on our long conversations and collaborations on fairytales to guide you into the world of ‘Once Upon a Time’. Asking where is it? What does it look like? What does it mean? Explore fairytale images of time: on the stroke of your pens – midnight! Find lost seconds from…
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Sally Pomme Clayton
“Some people are born to entertain – Sally Pomme Clayton has that magic in plenty, she is a dream-weaver, a spell-binder.” The Londonist Sally Pomme Clayton – please call her Pomme – is a pioneering storyteller and writer creating unique performances, books and plays for theatres, museums, gardens, galleries, festivals and broadcast. With sparkling words, playful humour and haunting images she performs fairytales, witty folktales, romances and fragments of forgotten myths. She creates dark and gleaming stories set in strange worlds that seem strangely close. Her performances are captivating, tender, elegantly crafted and shot through with songs and unusual musical sounds. She has recently appeared at: The Royal Opera House;…
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The Magician’s Apprentice
“The magnificent, magical Sally Pomme Clayton wowed us all at Exeter Customs House – storytelling and sheer wonder.” Literature Works With a top hat from a junk shop and mail-order wand, pioneering storyteller and writer Sally Pomme Clayton explores the secret world of the magician. In this bewitching performance she mixes fact with fiction, fragments of myth with antique jokes, dazzling fairytales with snippets of science, forgotten folklore with mysterious images on tarot cards. With a song on her mandolin and a spotted handkerchief she casts a shimmer of stories, shifting from humour to horror, romance to rumour searching for real magic. “Sally Pomme Clayton was truly spellbinding with her…
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The Frog Princess Punked
The Frog Princess Punked combines pioneering storyteller Sally Pomme Clayton, and girl punk band, The Swamp Girls. Together they create a hybrid hullabaloo of spoken word, distorted guitars, scorching drums, riotous songs, and dynamic performance storytelling set within a shifting collage of surreal animations and films that are v-jayed live! This performance was on tour in March 2020 when the pandemic struck. We would love to do it again, but lost everything. If you would like to host this performance at your festival please ask. The Slits with stories!” What happens when Ivan marries a frog? A wicked racket! Urban meets forest. Patriarchy meets feminism. Baba Yaga meets Koschey the…
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Night Visit
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Love in the shadows
Dust off your heart, dance with the devil.Kiss in the dark, a romantic revel.Under the stars, abandon your woes.Venus in furs, love in the shadows! Love in the Shadows is sheer, magical delight and shadowy enchantment, a combination of stories and shadows. Dark and gothic fairytales for grown-ups accompanied by Pomme’s little shadow puppet theatre. Stories of devil lovers, lonely lasses, passionate Goddesses, lusty lads are peppered with delicate images from a teeny, tiny shadow theatre. These are stories of having and not having, of longing and loosing, of making mistakes, and living to tell the tale. A night for all hot hearts – get lost in the dark, meet your…
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Solomon and Sheba
Provoking, seductive, and a virgin, the Queen of Sheba visits King Solomon to test his wisdom. Riddles and tricks, desire and foolishness ensue, as they unravel each others’ histories. Sheba has a bird’s claw and hairy legs and Solomon falls passionately in love with her. As his attempts to seduce her get increasingly desperate, he looses his wisdom and his throne, before the secret of Sheba’s virginity is revealed. Sally Pomme Clayton snips and clips stories of this royal duo from Sumerian, Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic traditions, tracing Sheba’s ancestry back through Medieval folklore to Adam’s first wife, Lilith, and forward to the nursery tales of Mother Goose. Told with…
