PRESS RELEASE

Award winning Comedian and radio/tv presenter Marcus Brigstocke has just returned from a 10 day voyage to the Arctic and wants to talk about his first experiences with Inuit Greenlanders.

Whilst there he ate raw seal liver, touched icebergs (and attempted to board them), performed stand up on a glacier, jammed with world famous pop stars, retold Milton's classic 'Paradise Lost' and shared a Russian research vessel with 43 fascinating and provocative artists and scientists from around the world. There's no book to sell, nor TV program, tour or DVD to promote, just a great story that begs to be told while it is still fresh. As a comic, Marcus is in a unique position to convey the humour of this amazing project and to talk about positive responses to climate change.

The Cape Farewell concept was put together by artist David Buckland and the premise is simple - take some of the best artists from around the world and put them together with scientists, geologists, oceanographers and local guides to see for themselves the effects of climate change in the Arctic. Having done so each of the artists is then engaged in the process of lifting the whole topic of climate change out of the mire of doom and gloom hectoring and depressing finger wagging that has made it so hard to get to grips with.

This latest adventure saw Cape Farewell expand their operation to include such musical giants as Jarvis Cocker, KT Tunstal, Martha Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, Vanessa Carlton, Leslie Feist, Robyn Hitchcock and academy award winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto . Also exploring the area between Disko Bay and the famed and elusive North-West passage were Academy Award winning film maker Peter Gilbert , playwright Suzan-Lori Parks , Radio 4 science presenter Quentin Cooper , artistic director of the South Bank Centre Jude Kelly as well as authors, activists, architects, poets, a beat boxer, actors and of course a brilliant team of scientists.

The Disko Bay voyage was Cape Farewell's 7 th trip to the Arctic, but the first to reach the west coast of Greenland and unique in its encounters with Greenlandic culture, history and food. Accompanied by two Greenlandic guides Marcus met people who still subsist solely on hunting and until recently survived on nothing other than raw seal, whale, reindeer, bear, fish and walrus. They have endured for thousands of years in a delicate balance with the precarious nature of the far north, housed in turf huts, heated and lit with whale blubber through four and half months of perpetual night, hunting, telling stories, singing songs and performing shamanistic rituals. The impact of this otherworldly existence on Marcus and the rest of the Cape Farewell crew has been huge.

A trip to the children's home in Ummannak proved a fascinating exchange of cultural and musical generosity. The children sang and played variously on recorders, guitars and a piano and in return - world famous musicians who have amassed sales of millions of records and play to giant sell out arenas picked up their instruments and offered their music to the Greenlandic orphans whose responses varied from open mouthed awe to utter boredom and bafflement.

Marcus's first Arctic trip was in 2007 when he sailed from Svalbard (Norway) around the edge of the Ice Cap (across the 78 th parallel) to the East coast of Greenland. A terrifying and traumatising misadventure in which the proposed five day crossing was thwarted by ice and took the Cape Farewell team a total of nine days under sail in severe weather before they set foot on a totally deserted east coast of Greenland, several hundred miles south of where they had intended to go. Despite the seasickness and life threatening horror of the Arctic Ocean, Marcus wrote daily blogs beamed across the sky by standing out on deck in minus 20 holding the satellite dish in the freezing air, searching for a signal. Upon his return he included the story of his time aboard the Noordelicht (Northern Lights) schooner in his stand up show, proving that climate change can be made funny and interesting in the right hands. At present Marcus is writing a play based on the 2007 voyage. This positive response was what prompted David Buckland to invite him again in 2008 to continue the story and to keep spirits up on the boat with his imaginative and hilarious take on subjects that most comedians steer clear of.

The Cape Farewell website - www.capefarewell.com - includes thousands of fabulous pictures and access to some incredible footage of the landscape and the artist's responses to it. There are also biogs of voyagers from this trip and previous ones and some excellent blog writing. Marcus has access to all the footage and can bring images and film with him.