Oh to be a snail with Amy Murray

Oh to be a snail is a live performance combining physical theatre and storytelling. It was written and created by Florence Logan with performer/actor Amy Murray, with support from BSL/spoken English interpreter Karen Forbes. It was performed by Florence Logan and Amy Murray in the Clubroom at the CCA (Glasgow, February 2024). ​

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"I breathed in the beautiful spring morning but somewhere along the way from my tongue to my tummy, the sky turned sour like milk. The clouds congealed and curdled and the rancid sunrise made my tired eyes sting. I was homesick."

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Oh to be a snail is a fleshy tender fable about finding home and meeting the mother, the lover, the tree, and the snail along the way. 

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This close-up piece of fantastical storytelling takes the naivety of the fable, the audience experience of a story-time and the aesthetics of bouffon circus and squishes them into a shapeshifting surreality. At one moment, a hopeful dreamscape, and at the next, a twisted trickster tale. 

In the clingy world of  Oh to be a snail, the audience is taken on an adventure of deceitful cuteness and slimy sweetness, of unconditional care and tireless generosity. We follow a series of earnest, obsessive and exposing attempts to love and be loved, to find home and to be it. 

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Through a choreographic patchwork of movement, poetic prose and British sign language (BSL), this performance explores home as a ‘doing’ which is practiced through the body and researches the clumsiness of care between human, non-human and somewhere in-between beings. The story is told in/from the body, from the vast imaginary worlds it contains and everything the body can become - its delicious metamorphosis.

This performance is an invitation for to come closer (even closer, I'll hold you here I promise), to linger for too long (please never leave me), to snuggle in the performer’s home-body (deep inside, where it’s warm), to collectively swaddle the imaginary (look how it drools), to walk within all the leaky landscapes and squishy stories the body holds (let’s go on an adventure and get lost in the flesh and fake our deaths so we never have to come back). Lucky you.

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