Haiflu Ever After

Project Haiflu was one of the runaway creative success stories of 2020 and 2021. A crowdsourced poetry and photography project created by poet and artist Liv Torc that used contributed haiku and photography, alongside music and film, to tell a week-by-week creative social history of our lives during one of the biggest crises of the last 100 years.

From a simple request on Facebook, Haiflu ended up engaging over 10,000 thousand people, engaging support from National Poetry Day, MIND, the NRTF and the Living Knowledge Network at the British Library. It was featured on the Radio 4 Today Programme and became ‘Word of the Week’ in The Times and Sunday Times.

During the course of the project Liv made 23 short films, featuring contributions from over 500 citizen artists.

Now thanks to the Arts Council, Haiflu is going on tour with a full-length show that tells the story of the project, alongside Liv’s own personal journey during that time. The show features two specially made lockdown films, Liv’s poetry and beautiful live music from project composer and pianist Richard Monks.

Audience members will be invited to write their own haiflu as part of the show, which will be woven into a live performed piece and included as part of the new online Haiflu archive – so the story keeps growing and we all get to be part of the art.