Stars and Their Consolations: Daniel Morden on Myth, Music, and the Night Sky

When storyteller and performer Daniel Morden looks up at the night sky, he doesn’t just see stars. He sees the human impulse to make meaning — to draw lines between points of light and turn them into stories that help us navigate our lives. His new touring production, Stars and Their Consolations, takes that instinct and transforms it into a visually rich, musically immersive theatre experience that blends ancient Greek myth with contemporary sound and image.

The show, which opens at Theatr Ffwrnes on 21 March before touring to Milford Haven and Newport, invites audiences to lie back, look up, and rediscover the sky as our ancestors once did: as a source of comfort, perspective, and wonder.

I sat down with Daniel to talk about the origins of the piece, the role of electroacoustic music in storytelling, and why he hopes audiences will pause just a little longer when they step outside after the show.

Why We Seek Consolation in the Stars

Chris: Tell me a little more about the title — Stars and Their Consolations. Where did that come from?

Daniel: When we look up, we’re predisposed to see patterns. Humans make meaning out of chaos — it’s part of who we are. You look at clouds and see castles or monsters. You look at a doorknob and see a face. And when something happens to us, we immediately start shaping it into a narrative: luck, fate, destiny. I find that compulsion fascinating. It’s ancient. It’s universal.

From Storytelling Festival to Full Theatre Production

Chris: The piece began life at a storytelling festival. What made you feel these myths wanted to grow into a full theatre production?

Daniel: It was always intended to be theatre. Even at the festival, it was mixed media — we had the electroacoustic soundtrack, and at one point we performed with silent-disco headphones while the audience lay on a hill looking at the sky. They couldn’t even see us! The theatre version is just an extension of that idea. I’ve performed it with and without the technology, and it’s fascinating how the audience’s experience shifts when the tech becomes part of the storytelling.

How Music Shapes Myth

Chris: There’s a lot of electroacoustic scoring in the show. How does the music shape the storytelling?

Daniel: Music moves us far more quickly than words. With a story, you have to build a world, a character, a problem. With music, you play three notes and suddenly there’s a mood. In many of the stories, the music comes first — the audience hears something expansive or uneasy or wild, and that emotional landscape shapes how they receive the story.

Creating an Intimate Yet Visually Rich Experience

Chris: The show is described as intimate but visually rich. How do you keep that fireside storytelling feeling inside a theatre?

Daniel: The projections are mostly abstract — nebulae, the Milky Way, flickering stars. They shift the audience’s mood the way a fire does. When you tell a story by firelight, people aren’t looking at you; they’re looking at the flames, and that frees their imagination. In the theatre, the projections let the storyteller almost vanish. The audience enters a kind of dream-state where they imagine the images more vividly.

And the scale matters. These are stories that reach for the vastness of the night sky — they need that sense of enormity.

Restoring the Night Sky

Chris: You’ve spoken about “restoring the night sky” through storytelling. What do you hope audiences notice differently when they look up after seeing the show?

Daniel: I hope they look up for a few moments longer than they normally would. We’re surrounded by beauty and mystery, but we become desensitised. If the show helps people pause — by the car, at the bus stop — and really see the sky, then maybe it supports the wider effort in Wales to preserve dark skies. It’s good for our wellbeing, and for the wellbeing of every living thing we share the night with.

Ancient Stories, Modern Questions

Chris: Do you have a favourite myth in the show?

Daniel: There’s a story about Asclepius, raised by a centaur who teaches him how to heal. He’s warned never to raise the dead — that’s the realm of the gods. But one day he sees a snake revive another snake with a leaf. He uses the leaf to resurrect a corpse, and the gods strike him down for crossing that boundary. He becomes the Serpent Bearer.

That story fascinates me. Being told not to do something and doing it anyway — how human is that? And the question of boundaries: how far can we go, and how do we know when we’ve gone too far? It feels very contemporary when you think about cloning, AI, all of it. And the symbol — the staff with two snakes — is still used by healers today. These stories endure.

Building a Show Where Sound, Image, and Voice Are Equals

Chris: What’s it like building a show where sound, image, and voice all carry equal weight?

Daniel: It’s like being in a band. Usually I’m alone on stage and I have to fill the space myself. Here, I’m one component of a larger experience. I adjust my performance — I don’t deliver the stories with the same emotional intensity, because the music is doing that more effectively than I could. It’s a different kind of collaboration.