Explore Funding from Immersive Arts for HAG / GWRACH
DAUR are delighted to announce that we have been awarded Explore Funding from Immersive Arts to begin developing HAG / GWRACH alongside Director, Actor, Writer and Theatre Maker Hannah McPake.
We’re incredibly chuffed to be supported by Immersive Arts as we begin the early research and exploration phase of this new work. HAG / GWRACH is a developing theatrical and immersive project rooted in folklore, transformation, womanhood, landscape, myth, and the monstrous feminine, drawing inspiration from Welsh mythology, Celtic folklore, ritual, and contemporary storytelling.
The project takes its name from the Welsh word Gwrach, meaning hag, witch, crone, or old woman, a figure so often feared, mocked, erased, or misunderstood within folklore and society. Through this early exploration period, DAUR and Hannah McPake will investigate how live performance, sound, visual storytelling, digital experimentation, and immersive practice might combine to create a work that feels both ancient and startlingly contemporary.
At the heart of the project is an interest in transformation: the shifting body, the ageing body, the wild body, the silenced body, and the stories that women and marginalised people carry through generations. The work will explore ideas of folklore as inheritance, the landscape as memory, and the hag figure as something far more powerful than a stereotype or warning tale.
This funding will allow us time to experiment, play, research, and ask questions without needing immediate answers. As a company, DAUR is deeply committed to courageous play, interdisciplinary experimentation, and creating space for unexpected discoveries to emerge through process. We’re excited to explore how immersive technologies and approaches can sit alongside raw storytelling, mythic imagery, performance, and human connection.
We’re especially thrilled to be collaborating with Hannah McPake on the project. Hannah’s work as a director, performer, writer, and theatre maker shares many of the questions and creative instincts that sit at the centre of DAUR’s practice, blending emotional honesty, bold theatricality, and a fascination with folklore, identity, and transformation.
Over the coming months we’ll be exploring visual language, sound, folklore research, movement, story development, and the wider world of HAG / GWRACH as the project begins to take shape.
A huge thank you to Immersive Arts for believing in the project at this early stage. We can’t wait to begin.
Further updates will be shared as the research develops.
