Genesis of Blodlina

Heil og sæl, og verið velkomin til Birka!
(Hello, and welcome to Birka!)

In September 2019, in a small Colchester living room. Marcus, Nathan and Vicky met for the first time. Brought together by a love of all things Viking. We chatted over mugs of tea and rifled through the mountain of research Vicky had been collecting for a few years on female warriors throughout history. Inspired by their tales, and one caffeine fuelled piano jam session later Blodlina: The Viking Musical was born.

We parted ways and started to build the foundations of the show. We wrote our first song, marked out the plot and then… 2020 happened. Whilst the pandemic floored our plans to meet, in some ways it was the catalyst for the story coming together. With nothing else to do, we created songs and wrote dialogue right into the heart of each night until we had completed a first draft.

Fast forward a year and a half and we were finally able to meet together again. We put together all of the pieces we’d collectively been developing over Zoom calls, Google drive documents and frantically garbled voice notes. When 2020 turned into 2021, we remotely gathered volunteers for a demo album, script read- throughs, and we had a more concrete idea of what the show would look like.

Blodlina made its first live appearance to a masked-up audience at a scratch night in May 2021 at The Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch. From the reception it received, we knew that it had legs. As the world came back, and we steadily released songs, we were talking to producers and finding out how to take our show to the next level. We also created some ‘Proof Of Concept’ music videos as we realised that our show sometimes can’t be communicated through words alone.

Now, almost 3 years of development later, we are ready to share our creation with the world, and hope that you feel as excited for its future as we do.

Skål!