Mythlab is an experimental and experiential laboratory which explores the meeting place of story with the personal and communal. Mythlab looks at how a deep exploration of the symbols, archetypes and relationships within wondertales, epics and myths, can inform enhance, nourish and expand the lived experience of an individual and the community. When life-experience and ancestral archetype meet at the crossroads, a questioning magic can be evoked.
Focusing on the fundamental mysteries of love, life, death and rebirth, Mythlab creates rituals of experimentation, performance, discussion, and workshop. Drawing on the playful expertise of its leaders, Mythlab events create sensuous and enlivening shared experiences for audiences to nourish, expand and renew a sense of self, relationship, spontaneity, joy and community.
About Mythlab
Mythlab was born in 2023 during Ben Haggarty’s year as a Visiting Fellow in the Creative Arts at Oxford University as a response to a challenging Arts and Wellbeing project undertaken with Steph Brittain for young people in a secure unit. This experience provoked a need to understand, through deep questioning and practical experimentation, how the arts can affect audiences particularly through the mysterious powers imbued by the ‘Beholders Share’.
NEW PROJECT
MYTHLAB – ON BIRDS & BEASTS
SWAN
Seeking Expressions of Interest in an exploratory day-long workshop on Swan.
We piloted a new, day-long, exploratory workshop focusing on SWAN and it’s symbolic, personal and collective resonances at Central School of Speech and Drama on June 28th 2025. We are now soliciting interest in a second outing to take place in a different location. This was explicitly NOT a storytelling workshop – it was an exploration of narrative content. This was our proposition:
“Those seriously interested in the content of traditional narratives (folktales, fairytales, epics and myths) are invited to a daylong, participatory exploration of a majestic bird and its totemic and symbolic attributes, with storytellers, Steph Brittain and Ben Haggarty. This is a workshop for therapists, educators and artists whose work engages with mythic images.
Through sharing and exploring a number of key legends, myths and fairytales about this magnificent animal; through looking at nature film and through playful processes of re-enactment, song, chant and movement, we will explore why and how this bird resonates so deeply within the global-wide wellspring of ancestral imagination…”
It was an amazing day provoking questions, wonder, listening, sound, movement, silence, stillness, tears and joy.
If you are seriously interested in the content of traditional narratives and would like to hear about opportunities to participate in another outing of this workshop please send an email to: ben@benhaggarty.com … And we’ll see if we can assemble a viable group.
[This is the first of three long-term investigations into totemic animals: Swan, Bear, Snake…]
ONGOING PROJECT
Mythlab – On Love
Mythlab’s fundamental ongoing project examines the many facets of Love, Eros and Desire. To arrange or devise an event, please contact us at: ben@benhaggarty.com
Elements include:
- Love Rites – a provocative public performance piece
- The Dionysus All-Nighter (!)
- ‘Beholders share’ – interactive food and story events in partnership with the Crick Crack Club.
- Secondary school performances for young women aged 13-16, using wondertale to explore themes of gender and power.
“There once lived a man … People who spoke to him instantly fell in love, but not with him, or, indeed, immediately with anybody in particular. All that they were aware of was that they had, after conversation with him, an active spirit of love which was ready to pour itself out in loving service. The European troubadours were perhaps such people. “
A.R Orage (On Love)
