Immersive Theatre – Live Art Alive

BLACKHAINE And Now I Know What Love Is

Devised and Choreographed by Blackhaine

DIECAST

There is something brutal and viscerally raw in Now I Know What Love Is. This latest unflinching offering from choreographer and experimental musician Tom Heyes, otherwise known Blackhaine is staged as part of the Manchester International Festival. This is a marmite piece not necessarily immersive in any traditional sense and its narrative is not easily explained as the audience is invited into to this “numb world”.

Blackhaine intentionally plunges the audience into a world where love is indistinguishable from violence, where tenderness coexists with terror, and where the physical body becomes both weapon and wound. The piece is a relentless assault on every level. Visually, sonically, emotionally, there is no escaping and any hint of a redemptive ending is fragile and uncertain. Here the narrative is pure sensation. There is no comfort to be found here but rather an invocation of feeling that stays long after the lights fade.

The performance opens in near darkness, soundscape throbbing with industrial menace as dancers slowly appear through the crowd moving blankly like zombies. Later bodies contort into jagged, frenetic shapes. Each movement seems torn from the flesh—jerking, spasming, collapsing. This is dance stripped to its rawest essence…survival. At times dancers pound the floor as though trying to summon the earth itself to respond. There is an urgency to the physicality that speaks of both personal and collective desperation, of lives lived on the brink. The sound design is punishing—waves of static, guttural noise, haunting synths—that builds and fragments, echoing the disintegration on stage. Lighting is stark, utilitarian: this is a space that refuses to comfort.

And yet, in the midst of this bleak landscape, there are fragile moments of strange beauty. The title Now I Know What Love Is hangs over the piece like a ghost. Love here is fragile and fleeting and always teetering on the edge of obliteration. The moments of guitar that creep in like cracks of light feel like a comforting homage to Vini Reilly and The Durutti Column but is just as quickly decimated by a screaming rant.

For some, the lack of narrative and the extremity of the aesthetic may prove alienating, however this is not a show that seeks approval. It is confrontational, even adversarial at times… there is no real guidance for anyone unfamiliar with immersive productions. For those willing to surrender to its fractured structure there offers something rare: a glimpse into the abyss.

In the end, Now I Know What Love Is is less about answers than about exposing discomfort. It scrapes away at the surface of performance, of identity, of the human condition, and dares you to look at what lies beneath. It is telling in an immersive performance that we the audience silently observe pain and possible death yet we do nothing to soothe or comfort. Faced with anguish we peer and occasionally photograph or film palpable distress before moving on to watch the next scene. Perhaps that makes us, the audience, the bleakest element of this production.

DIECAST 9th – 19th July 2025

Carousel Of US

Immersive Theatre, Site Specific

Created and Directed by Lowri Evans and Renato Bolelli Rebouças

Produced by From The Other

Swinton Square Shopping Precinct

I grew up in a one street village where everyone knew each other and a trip to the local shops took ages as everyone stopped to chat or exchange greetings in shops and between them. When the nearest big town opened the first shopping precinct in the County there was huge excitement and people flocked to visit this new take on everyday shopping. Nowadays we see and read about the death of the High Street and huge shopping centres like The Trafford Centre are peppered with vacant units. Carousel of Us is a site specific production at Swinton Square Shopping Precinct created to reconnect all of us with reminders of the community spirit that existed on those streets and small local precincts. Long-term collaborators (Precarious Carnaval and the marvellous The Shrine Of Everyday Things), Lowri Evans and Renato Bocelli Rebouças have co-created this production after working with the local community over a six month period.

The result is an immersive stroll that takes the audience on a time travelling experience with visits to a range of shops, a flower stand and a cafe at various points in the sixty year history of the precinct. On a supposed local history tour each small group has a guide that they follow as they look for shops etc that match the “photographs” of bygone eras. The cast are clad in costumes from the local Oxfam and many of the props have been created in community hub events or in local schools. The overall feel of this production is charming as these vignettes are interspersed with singing from an ethereal young duo looking down on the precinct square or dance pieces from children from the local dance academy Marieka’s Dance Studio and ballroom dancing from dancers from The Grand Palais Swinton.

Each piece is very different in tone but all are memorable and relatable. An anxious bride sporting a disastrous perm is having second thoughts on her wedding morning while her hungover Mother is more focused on mislaid wedding carnations. The slightly dodgy looking fiancé with a bad mullet turns out to have a heart of gold and this pair of Swinton would be Charlene and Scott from Neighbours might just end up Together,Forever. Elsewhere in the precinct there is a cut price freezer shop where everything is 50 piece or 12 for a Fiver. Run by and for the local community this vignette tells a story of strength forged through grief and culminates in all of us dancing round the freezer units with a Cher lookalike singing along to Believe. For me this is the high point in the whole production as everything about this piece felt so vivid and full of life and energy. A clothes shop being packed up to close forever takes us on a journey back in time to the hopes and dreams of the young couple who opened it in The Sixties and lovingly built it into a flourishing business until the precinct started to fail. A trip to the local “cafe” where coffee is simply coffee and the hotpot is legendary introduces us to a family run business who maintain a cheery facade while waiting and yearning for a phone call from a missing daughter. There is also an amusing short film accompanied by bags of popcorn where local children re enact news footage from when the precinct first opened.

There is real heart and commitment in this production and it culminates in all the ensemble cast dancing in the square which is decorated with bunting, lighting and numerous bubble machines. For a moment the shabbiness is replaced with a feelgood lustre and the whole space ignites with hope and excitement as it probably did when it first opened and local people explored this new element in their community. Carousel Of Us writes a new chapter into this old space and hopefully makes some new and happy memories for all who participated or attended this community production.

Carousel Of Us 4th – 6th July 2024

Lowri Evans

Renato Bocelli Rebouças

From The Other

ROBIN/RED/BREAST

Headphones, Immersive Theatre, Theatre

Adapted from Robin Redbreast by John Griffith Bowen

Writer Daisy Johnson

Co-Creators Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight

Director Sarah Frankcom

NORTH WAREHOUSE, AVIVA STUDIOS

ROBIN/RED/BREAST continues the highly successful collaboration between Factory International and Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight which began in 2013 with The Masque Of Anarchy. Last year’s Manchester International Festival saw Peake in a reading of the dystopian 70’s novel They which further cemented her artistic reputation as an accomplished actress and a beguilingly natural storyteller. This time the artistic team behind the new production company MAAT (Music, Art, Activism and Theatre) re-examine Robin Redbreast which first featured on the BBC in 1970 as part of the iconic Play For Today series. This piece of folk horror is uncomfortably pertinent as women are once again having to fight for their bodily autonomy and the right to make our own reproductive choices.

For any of us who grew up in a rural community there is an absolute normal in the strangeness of folklore and ritual. Cures handed down by the seventh son of a seventh son and sneaked into hospitals by desperate relatives or teenagers spat on and then blessed by a total stranger living in a remote house up the mountain as a cure for chickenpox were not at all unusual…or perhaps my upbringing was not as mundane as I have presumed. The Seventies produced a plethora of folk horror stories focusing on rural rituals especially around fertility and sacrifice which coincided with huge social revolutions for women around contraception and abortion. In this production Norah played by Maxine Peake is an independent woman who feels confident about her own choices regarding relationships, family and career. Choosing to opt out of city life after a relationship breakdown she finds herself alone in a cottage seeped in history where the rustling of mice and the whirr of wasps seem to open up crevices in time through the ancient walls. As we listen on headphones to Norah’s thoughts it is clear her sense of her own identity may be being threatened by sinister elements in the community around her.

Maxine Peake and Tyler Cameron in ROBIN/RED/BREAST at AVIVA STUDIOS.
Photo credit: Tristram Kenton

The staging by Lizzie Clachan is stunning in its simplicity. Walking into the cool dimness of the North Warehouse with its huge ceiling, the wooden frame of the cottage nestled on a rich earth floor feels like magically coming across a forest cathedral. All pathways leads toward it and staged in the round with audience on benches it exudes the feeling of a natural amphitheatre. The audience don headphones and are immersed in the sound of birdsong, scuttling mice and the thoughts that come racing through Norah’s mind as loneliness, lust and looming fears begin to creep in like the bindweed that invades the sanctity and safety of her cottage walls. When the febrile dancing abates and the cottage is suddenly ripped away there is nothing left but the dank, rich earth of Mother Nature merging with the prone form of Norah asleep on the forest floor.

The music by Gazelle Twin blends beautifully with the dreamy poetry of writer Daisy Johnson who has also worked on Viola’s Room, the latest immersive production by Punchdrunk. There is a very surreal feel to this production further enhanced by elements such as a female brass band who silently observe Norah and are clad in vivid red and white band uniforms that may evoke a group of Robin Redbreasts yet also a female army who may or may not protect Norah from impending threat. The langorous choreography by Imogen Knight adds to the atmosphere as we observe Norah like a character from a fairytale awaking in this cottage, going about her chores and coupling in the woods with a handsome forester.

Maxine Peake draws in the audience as she moves around her cottage home, suitably vexed as she scrubs menstrual blood from her bedsheets and later perplexed as her contraceptive cup has seemingly vanished. Listening to her flurry of thoughts through headphones makes for a potent connection to the character so when she finally speaks aloud to the audience it feels like we might really know Norah or indeed perhaps Maxine. This could be any woman and that is where the true fear lies…rising like the torrent of water that threatens to wash away homes, hopes and security like a deluge of miscarriage blood or the tumultuous waters that may drown a mother or her child in a flimsy refugee boat.

Peake is at her very best when speaking directly with an urgent softness that evokes inclusion and intimacy. Huddled in a circle on blankets the young women silently listen as she speaks of abortion choices, miscarriage traumas and the brutality of the lottery that occurs everyday in a maternity unit. Women bleed whether they abort, miscarry or give birth. They do not know if they will love unconditionally or struggle to feel anything or veer between fierce love and the overwhelming desire to put him down…whatever that may mean at any one time. In such a lottery of joy and despair it is terrifying enough to be a woman without additionally fearing others may try to enforce their choices and beliefs on us.

AVIVA STUDIOS 15th – 26th May 2024

DARK NOON

Immersive Theatre, Large Theatres, Uncategorized

Director and Scriptwriting Tue Biering

Choreographer and Co-Director Nhlanhla Mahlangu

AVIVA STUDIOS

It is great to see AVIVA STUDIOS showing a big explosive production fresh from Edinburgh Fringe 2023. Award winning Danish company Fix+Foxy unite with a cast of South African performers to open the history books that celebrate the birth of the American Dream and gleefully rip it up and rewrite the story. Film and Television endlessly celebrate the first settlers, the brave battles protecting “their” land from the Native American tribes, the thrill of the Gold Rush and the romance of the cowboys riding out on the frontier plain. DARK NOON exposes the mythology and is a darkly funny and brutal reimagining.

The Warehouse plays host to a vast bare stage depicting the rich red soil of the Wild West. The audience sit on three sides of the stage with the fourth dominated by a massive screen on which many of the scenes play out in close up. Somehow the cast of seven seem to fill the space with action from the onset. At times props appear as small vignettes are played out as chapters of history. The first settlers take their perilous journey from Europe starving, sick and often drowning. Its a powerful reminder of what migrants are suffering right now as they seek their own to fulfil their own dream of a better future. Finding and claiming land they protect it fiercely from the indigenous population. At one point the stage becomes a sports stadium where the live commentary is broadcast as the Settlers play the Natives with brutal consequences.

The props on stage grow almost imperceptibly, first a little house on the prairie appears, a railway track is built by Chinese immigrants signalling the arrival of a saloon bar, a church, a gold mine and a barb wire enclosure for the Native Americans. All is deftly done with a fluid , muscular choreography and the pace of the action never falters. Audience members are interacted with and frequently immersed into the performance as slaves in the auction, churchgoers or incarcerated prisoners.

Throughout the frequent costume changes the performers reapply their white-face make up and blonde wigs as they poke fun at the imperious settlers who now seem as misguided and out of touch with reality as the current contenders for the next American presidency. Writer and Director Tue Biering has zeroed in on the terrifying reality that a mass historical psychosis where violence becomes the acceptable norm is not the dream but a living nightmare. DARK NOON lays bare uncomfortable truths and pulls its audience quite literally unto the pages of a terrifying pop-up storybook that is still being written today.

AVIVA STUDIOS 6th-10th March 2023

In The Time Of Dragons

Immersive Theatre, Musical, Small Theatres

Written and Directed by Janine Waters

Music by Simon Waters and Alec Waters

The Edge Theatre

Stepping into the theatre for this production is an immediate immersion into 1960s club life. The opulent deep red of the theatre space is a perfect foil to the blue neon sign for The Blue Angel. A smartly dressed Alec Waters is seated at the piano and the side of stage is dotted with tables with lamps and tablecloths giving the audience the option to watch the show from the stalls or within the club itself. When Chanteuse Sheelagh Bell steps up to the microphone onstage in her gold lamè dress it really does feel like being in an intimate club setting.

Writer and Director Janine Waters has lovingly crafted this production into something quite magical. Each character feels fully fleshed out and utterly believable. It would have been easy to slip into a pastiche of the Swinging Sixties but thankfully Waters has a light touch and the piece feels very fresh and acutely observed. This is an ambitious piece for a small theatre as it frequently flits from the club in 1965 to a classroom setting in 2024 and a Salford flat simultaneously in both eras. The set design by David Howarth is highly effective and deceptively simple. Especially in scenes where the two eras collide as the divan beds align with a crumpled stripe duvet and a neat pastel counterpane.

The two central characters are nightclub singer Sheelagh and teacher Jack. Making her professional debut is Megan Keaveney who is perfectly cast as the pretty young singer navigating a disappointing marriage while pursuing her dream of a record deal and a career in music. Her vocal delivery is impressive and I’d probably pay to see her perform these songs in a nightclub now or in the Sixties. Coronation Street veteran Rupert Hill is great as the crumpled music teacher who abandoned his musical dreams for a love that turned sour. He is initially downbeat and desperate but his character starts to grow in confidence and stature as he finds his way back back to a love of music. Both characters act as a perfect foil for each other to make momentous shifts. The other two performers adeptly take on a number of roles. Tom Guest brings warmth and humour to his role as the kindly club manager and clearly relishes his role as the feckless husband/manager. His rendition of “That’s My Job” brings the house down. A catchy tune with pithy, witty lyrics that poke sly, gentle fun at men with a wandering eye who refuse to blame their big Y chromosome. Hannah Nuttall gives a really subtle performance as the stoic dresser who loves Shellagh and is comfortable in her own sexuality. Nuttall is quietly luminous as Anne and its impossible not to be routing for her to have her happy ending too.

Tom Guest as Frank in In The Time of Dragons at The Edge Theatre 📷Joel Fildes

This production is peppered with witty asides and genuine humour and the songs are uniformly strong with great tunes from Simon and Alec Waters, the clever lyrics drive the narrative and never feel shoehorned into the production. Running at 80 minutes without interval this could easily have sustained a longer running time and an interval. There is real love invested in the story telling and a celebration of the power of music, friendship and kindness. In The Time of Dragons is a worthy follow up to Spinach. I look forward to seeing what the creative team at The Edge do next.

THE EDGE THEATRE 19th Feb – 9th March 2024

FREE YOUR MIND

Dance, Immersive Theatre, Large Theatres

Co-created by Michael ‘Mikey J’ Assante, Danny Boyle, Es Devlin, Sabrina Mahfouz and Kenrick ‘H20′ Sandy

Commissioned by FACTORY INTERNATIONAL

AVIVA STUDIOS

The first ever Manchester International Festival launched in 2007 and quickly established a reputation for promoting and creating ambitious new works. Artistic Director John McGrath took over from Alex Poots in 2015 when the idea for a permanent building was already being floated. Fast forward to now and from the ashes of the old Granada Studios and with an eye watering bill of approximately £242 million Factory International finally opens the doors of Aviva Studios. Devised by Danny Boyle, Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante, Es Devlin, Sabrina Mahfouz and Kenrick ‘H20’ Sandy; the show to launch the building is FREE YOUR MIND. It is a huge scale hip hop dance homage to iconic movie The Matrix via a tribute to Manchester’s proud industrial past and reputation for innovation.

The first half is in the Hall and opens with a vast blackboard filled with equations…its a lecture theatre and one of the great founders of computer intelligence, Alan Turing, is giving a lecture via an old black and white TV screen. A quick lesson on the birth of the computer age and Manchester’s role, takes us even further back to the 1700s and Arkwright and the birth of the industrial age. Staccato pulsing bodies flood the stage and Turing is gone leaving the legacy that will be The Matrix and hinting at the A.I. world we now inhabit. The first of many dramatic shifts occurs as the back of stage is punctured with light beams as the punch cards of the first Jacquard loom are replicated. Dancers appear sheathed like gossamer condoms that stretch up and connect to the ceiling. Beautifully lit they weave through each other like a maypole of lost souls. Each dance piece has drama and demands attention. Neo appears, as does the red wigged Trinity clad in glistening black PVC. Bowler hatted dancers in rubber ridged trousers appear like futuristic Bertie Bassets and a wraith-like dancer performs in front of a glistening golden orb punctuated with the holes of bullets or punch cards of computers or grafting workers. The trial of the first computer charged with killing a human is a brutal annihilation with murderlous beams of light. An aerial performer swings across the stage as black discs of destruction rain down.

Suddenly its time to follow the white rabbits through to an interval filled with Matrix inspired figures suspended in mid air while grooving rabbits dance and workers silently graft at machines. The tannoy announces time to divide the audience and blue wristbands go one way and red through a different route into the Warehouse.

Stark and minimalist the vast space is wrapped in white cotton, possibly a nod to Manchester’s historic role in the cotton industry. Running through the middle is a huge white runway suggesting a futuristic fashion runway or conveyor belt. Screens running its full length project images of the building of the Mancunion Way, Ian Curtis, Tony Wilson and the old Granada Studios to the pulsing sound of Blue Monday by New Order. As the screens raise the dancers start to emerge. Before the final battle scenes of The Matrix the runway looks like a bizarre fashion show of costumes by Gareth Pugh fashioned to showcase Apple and Amazon rather than Armani, Twitter and Facebook instead of Tom Ford. These images are startling and darkly funny as they reflect our current human obsessions with consumerism technology and social media. They are all the more potent as audience member immediately try to capture whats happening on stage on their phones.

Dancers karate kick their way down the runway and choreographer Kenrick ‘H20’ Sandy makes for a molten and mighty Morpheus. The ultimate scenes with Neo (Corey Owens) and Trinity (Nicey Belgrave) play out in a flurry of bullets of light and coding. It’s truly a spectacular sight that is powerfully impacted by the incredible lighting and video design by Lucy Carter and Luke Halls.

A scene from Free Your Mind. Commissioned and produced by Factory International @ Aviva Studios. Credit: Tristram Kenton

This show is a theatrical extravaganza that is all about showing off and celebrating being here in this brand new space in this city that so many of us love. FREE YOUR MIND isn’t a seamless production telling a cohesive and fully comprehensible story. It’s clear that it’s been in development for almost as long as it’s taken to get the building from concept to construction. It involves a wide range of creatives imagining a work for a stage that wasn’t even built and with a vision of creating something that was about possibilities for what could develop in this new space…about creative possibilities that are yet to be imagined. I like the unabashed joy of opening the doors to the playroom, ushering in the kids and saying Explore! Imagine! Play! This is a huge production using both the 1600 seater theatre and the vast warehouse space that could accommodate a Boeing 747. This is all about spectacle and showing off what these spaces will creatively allow us to do in Manchester. There is an incredible sound system in a building that can seamlessly adapt to different sized audiences in productions that could scale 64metres long and 21 metres wide and accommodate 5000 people while also allowing for floors that can flood and drain. The second half evokes one of my favourite MIF openings when in 2017 Jeremy Deller premiered What Is the City but the People when 100 people walked a gigantic walkway in Piccadilly Gardens celebrating Mancunions from all walks of life. Artistic Director John McGrath and his team have a shared vision for this new building and for Manchester…Invent Tomorrow Together. Let’s hope that FREE YOUR MIND is truly a gateway to new possibilities and just a taste of what is yet to come.

Factory International 13th October – 5th November 2023

Vice Versa

Contemporary Dance, Gig Theatre, Immersive Theatre, Performance Art, Small Theatres, Spoken Word

Written, Co-produced and Performed by Dorcas Seb

Directed by Emmy Lahouel

HOME

Wide eyed and smiling earnestly Dorcas Seb dances in a repetitive, slightly robotic style. The audience slowly start to fill 3 sides of the stage and sit while Seb continues to dance. The music shifts subtly as a more electronic hum starts to merge in and create a more ominous tension. The 3D effect set by Dylan Howells is strikingly beautiful with its neon blue and pink lights that flicker and flow across the floor and backdrop like neural pathways in an artificial brain or a strange simulation of the tree of life. By the time Seb actually starts to speak she has already created an absorbing, dystopian vibe that feels trance like and strangely calming.

Vice Versa was originally conceived as an E.P in 2018 but has been crafted into a visually arresting, evocative piece of performance art/gig theatre. Commissioned by Eclipse Theatre and HOME as part of the Slate: Black. Arts. World project in 2018/19, with development support from Unity Theatre and funded by Arts Council England. It is clearly a deeply personal project for Seb which explores the modern digital world and our increasing fixation and reliance on our phones and computer screens as a means of communication. The original ideas behind this piece in 2018 were to become even more sharply prevalent during the pandemic when our spoken words mainly flowed from our fingers and direct eye contact was via a Zoom screen.

Dorcas Seb is a confident and accomplished artist who creates an engrossing audience experience. The production feels genuinely immersive and the seating layout brings the audience so close to Seb it’s as if they too are awaiting induction into this new dystopian world. As a performer she seems to effortlessly move between dance, spoken word, song and some wickedly good characterisations. As she morphs into her Boss and gives a sassy, evangelical spiel to the new recruits, she really brings the character alive. There is a wonderful physicality to her performance and likewise when she sings her voice is rich and pure moving from spoken word to disco to RnB without flaw.

Dorcas Seb in Vice Versa. Image by Robin Clewley

Vice Versa takes us to a world where the Welfare State no longer exists and the Welt-exe state governs our thoughts and actions. Working hard and being a good citizen is rewarded with a repetitive bliss created by the experiences purchased when codes are currency and real dreams are a thing of the past. The world as perceived by Seb’s alter ego Xella is not exactly unpleasant in its familiarity and routine but her character is increasingly aware of her isolation and lack of human connectivity. 17 hour work days are interspersed with subway journeys, state infomercials and moments of joy when plugged into code REM where Xella momentarily can play Grandma’s Footsteps among the pixilated trees. It is during one of her journeys into artificial REM that the code glitches and her unwavering acceptance of this dystopian reality is challenged. Suddenly there are questions to be answered but no one to answer them…simply a quietly ruthless invitation to reboot or risk being ostracised as a crossed out.

Xella charts her own course and removes her digital collar to suddenly look up at the blue sky and the birds. Her redemptive journey is about connection and being in the moment. For the Crossed outers this may be an evangelical connection with Christ…for others it may be simply about living in the moment and being fully present with ourselves and others. However you choose to express your connectivity in the world Vice Versa is certainly a cautionary tale and we would all be wise to still connect to the digital world but start thinking about how we use it and not how it uses us.

HOME Theatre 1st and 2nd July 2022

Unity Theatre Friday 8th July 2022

A Home for Grief

Audio walks, Immersive Theatre, Site Specific

Created by Fabiola Santana and WilL Dickie

Audio walk is downloaded on Go Jauntly app

CONTACT THEATRE

Today 23 years ago I was mourning anew the loss of my father as I contemplated becoming a parent for the first time. I was imagining the new relationship I might have with my mother as she became a grandmother for the first time. 8.15pm tonight is the 23rd anniversary of my mother’s death. Birth and Death are certainties…the bit in between is the tricky bit. This morning I entered CONTACT for the first time since it reopened. It made me immediately think of Dave Murray, QuietManDave, another bereavement in my life who also loved theatre and loved this building. Was today really the day to walk and contemplate A Home for Grief?

Fabiola Santana created this audio walk and installation. The Portuguese dancer and theatre maker shares intimate memories of her own bereavements; a dearly loved father taken suddenly by the sea and a grandmother whose own family memories were slowly erased by dementia. Interspersed with her own reflections and a soundscape evoking the Portuguese coast are the voices of women from the North West who tell their own stories of grief. This approximately 50 minute walk is a study in quiet reflection…a opportunity to slow your pace…look around and above and just be…be comforted by the gentle voices of Fabiola and the other women.

There is nothing to fear in this contemplation of loss, and the warmth and supportive nature of Fabiola and fellow creator and sound designer WilL Dickie ensure that safeguarding is paramount in the production. They are present as you depart and when you return they guide you into the installation. Housed in the new Space O at CONTACT this installation is a series of spaces within a space that each have a short accompanying audio. Big leather chairs envelop you as you create your own memorial for a loved one. A rocking chair soothes you before you add to a growing story of remembrance. Other curios evoke feelings and connections as you move through a space interspersed with quilted hangings describing the varying landscapes of grief within us. A memory book is the fitting close to this emotional but incredibly comforting experience.

This is a unique and deeply personal theatre experience which deftly and mindfully navigates difficult subject matter. Plans are hopefully in place to create a permanent sound walk here as established at Lancaster Arts. Perhaps now more than ever before we need a A Home for Grief where like these women we feel witnessed, connected, comforted.

CONTACT 29TH – 31ST JULY 2021

Go Jauntly app

PATIENT 4620

Immersive Theatre, Uncategorized

Written and directed by Victoria Snaith

The Crypt, St Phillips, Salford

Saturday lunchtime is as good a time as any for a wander around a pitch black church crypt doubling up as a contemporary art museum and a mental hospital. Donning headphones and entering the exhibition Director Victoria Snaith is charmingly optimistic about the experience though does warn us all to not fiddle with the controls and watch our heads on the low arches in the gloomy but rather dreamy crypt.

Wandering around the exhibition we learn about the fragile 1920s artist Gretel Sauerbrot and her alcoholic brother Hansel. It quickly becomes clear that these are two seriously damaged individuals but by WW1 or something more unworldly…even more unspeakably horrible? Are the clues in the art itself or perhaps in what we hear as museum recording and something more sinister start to overlap?

Things are going swimmingly so far with a delicious hint of impending dénouement and horror beckoning round the next dark corner. Then suddenly the mood fractures with the appearance of a rather unorthodox psychiatrist (Robb Wildash) who may well be an wandering patient- and if he isn’t he certainly should be. One should never introduce oneself with a description of how you castrated yourself in a forest and then attempt to medicate your stunned patients with skittles and lemon drops without checking if they are diabetic.

There are some moments of genuine discomfort and potential scare. However this is a piece of immersive theatre that sadly loses pace as it shifts from auditory storytelling into theatre. The room I was waiting for never materialized and I felt entertained but strangely cheated by never catching a real glimpse of the crazed and tragic Gretel in this thoughtful twist on the famous folk tale.

Dreadfalls Theatre. Manchester Fringe 5th-6th July 2019

WHEN IT BREAKS IT BURNS

Immersive Theatre, Promenade, Site Specific, Uncategorized

Created/Performed by ColetivA Ocupação

Directed by Martha Kiss Perrone

CONTACT

Moss Side Millennium Powerhouse

ColetivA Ocupação are the real deal in every sense. Performers, creatives, activists, educators who vividly bring to life their personal experiences of occupying their schools in São Paulo to protest the Brazilian government’s proposed decimation of educational resources in 2015/2016. They are full of exuberance and boisterous passion and their mantra is “to occupy is to resist.”

Massing in the garden courtyard of Millennium Powerhouse the audience is suddenly led into a gym hall where chairs are scattered through the space and some are already occupied. Music, lighting and the intensity of the seated performers ramp up the sense of unease and palpable tension. As the action flares up it is clear that this is no easy ride sitting in a theatre observing a performance. The choreography ensures the audience members are in the thick of the action and occasionally at physical risk of the odd bruise. This is an intense immersive experience that feels utterly authentic and at times genuinely both scary and exhilarating.

Recreating what it was like to scale the walls Diadama School in 2015 they create a human wall which each triumphantly scales. As an audience we get to witness their excitement, their bravery and their fears as police surround the schools and many are dragged off. These were children, young people chasing police intimidation, beatings and tear gas. As they later talk to us in small groups recalling personal experiences it is clear that these vibrant young people have lived through life-changing experiences.

The sheer physicality of this performance and its riotous risk taking evokes passion and sheer admiration at its bravery and its hope. As we are moved off chairs and jostled as they creates barricades and banners these performers are setting alight a real desire to harness that youthful passion and make change happen. Whether it is in schools in Brazil or it is Environmental protests across the world…

Let’s occupy the schools. Let’s occupy the streets. Let’s occupy the theatres. Let’s occupy everything.

CONTACT 8th/9th May 2019

ColectivA Ocupação

Part of Resistance in Residence, a British Council programme.
A collaboration between Contact and Transform.
Made with support from Casa do Povo, Forma Certa and Converse.
Supported by British Council and The University of Manchester.
Image credit: Mayra Azzi