1, 2, 3 Resilient Mushrooms!  is a 15min pop-up performance that combines physical storytelling, dance and live music for ages 3+, featuring audience participation. This joyful, considerate and comedy-filled performance is an homage to the mushroom, to friendship and a hymn for hope. This performance tells the story of a landscape, treated poorly and almost abandoned, but not just yet, not by the mushrooms. Through ceilidh dancing, physical storytelling and Scottish traditional music, we show the underdog journey of three resilient mushrooms that not only survive but thrive, the only way they can, as a community. 

 

What begins as a misty melancholic tale quickly turns into a clownesque ceilidh, with a splat of slapstick. Live fiddle accompanies us on this journey, from sorrowful and lonely notes to a giddy, dance-inducing and positively jolly jig which the audience are invited to join - whether that be a finger, a foot, a hip and any bit in between, whether you're sat, standing, lying down or a bit of all three. You can go wild, linking arms and spinning until your hair stands up on its ends, or you can just nod your head and tap your heel like a merry little mushroom. In our ceilidh, there's room for everything:  for smaller/closer moments of dance between babies, toddlers and their carers as well as big spinning circles of giddy skipping, stomping and swishing. 1, 2, 3 Resilient Mushrooms!  is a dance-inducing celebration of life, an invitation to care for the smaller pockets of the world, and an opportunity to hold hands and be together, because there can never be enough of those. 

 

1, 2, 3 Resilient Mushrooms!  tells the epic tale of the tiny fungal communities that grow in littered roadside ditches in the peripheries of the world. Mushrooms embody the cruciality of community, and demonstrate resilience that spans centuries. Our starting point was 'The Mushroom at the End of the World' by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and how she describes the mushroom’s survival as fantastical and fabulous because “how else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?”. We were curious as to how we could translate the complex ideas of collaborative survival, environmental issues, and interspecies care for a very young audience in a way that was accessible and playful yet not less meaningful.  In this performance, we challenge ourselves to create a story with “the landscape as the protagonist” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing). 

 

This performance was made with fiddle-player Eilidh Inara. The costumes were created by Kiera Saunders. 1, 2, 3 Resilient Mushrooms!   was originally commissioned by Imaginate and OneRen in 2025, supported by the Village Storytelling Centre.  It has been performed at Paisley Book Festival, Pollok Kite Festival, Edinburgh International Children’s Festival’s family day (Imaginate) and Merchant City Festival’s family day. The costumes were recently exhibited at Odd Fabrication’s Wearable Art Show in East Sussex in 2026.

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For 1, 2, 3 Resilient Mushrooms!  performance enquiries, please get in touch:  

florencejlogan@me.com

hopeckennedy@gmail.com