The Rainbow Witch

In development 2026

She is a habitat. She grows, she eats, she photosynthesises. She is slime mould, jackal, satellite. A collection of songs, stories, soft things, hard things, shiny things, living things and dead things.

The Rainbow Witch spins us a tale of how she came to be, that celebrates the diversity of our planet. It is a joyfully silly celebration of the unknowable, chaotic mess of plants, animals, people and things we call home. The cloud of gasses in the far nebula, and a party of bacteria in the gut. The micro and the macro, and how we need both. How we ARE both. It calls on us to notice and protect what's around us, and see the tiny hidden living worlds on our doorsteps, in our bodies and out across the universe.

Creative Team:

Director: Ed Rapley

Performer and Designer: Tomasin Cuthbert

The Rainbow Witch Scratch performance at The Puppet Parlour, Shambala Festival 2025

Tomasin is a **Theatre maker, Designer, and Illustrator**. She has developed a bold, unique visual language, which she has deepened through her collaborations with the other exceptional artists she works with.

Our process will move through 5 overlapping stages:

Research will include our time with the archive, wider thematic topics, journals & conversations with collaborators.

Development takes us into expressing initial creative starting points, attending workshops to learn new skills, & beginning making with collaborators.

Construction has us working with cloth, paint, soldering irons, cables, wood, found objects & open source hardware to build the environment for the devising phase.

Devising is the open ended, in the moment play which guides us towards what the performance wants to be, it lets us fall in love with the show that is being created.

Presentation, as yet unknown in form, this is the stage where we open out, a cluster of mushrooms flourishing from the mycelium. We imagine liveness, playful performance, presence, encompassing visual & auditory worlds.

We will be working with several new collaborators on this project, including creative technologist Robin Thorn, Costume Engineer Jay Williams & Partnering Little Lost Robot, who are offering in-kind time & support at their Lab in Radstock. We want to allow time for these relationships to develop & for their voices to impact the work.

We want to explore themes of trickery, theft & remorse in the context of ecological complexity & human desire, using the Selkie Myth, & science fiction as jumping off points. It’s about biodiversity, humanity's place within it & asks: How does Art propel action?

What happens when we get caught with our hand in the microbial cookie jar? We’re only playing around after all & what harm can it do? Well maybe we’ll just take a little more than we need this time…

In 2025 we spent 2 days in the rehearsal room & 1 in the writing room using these starting themes, & shared an early version at Shambala festival: part storytelling experience, part DJ set, part walkabout. It was an exciting beginning, & now, with no set genre or final expression, we are dreaming of live immersive experiences, performances across street, festival, & theatre locations, interactive exhibitions & audio environments.

In our 2026 R and D, we want time to play with new collaborators, develop burgeoning skills, ingest inspiration & give the artistic process time to ferment & become deliciously complex.