Image credit: Archie Finch
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.
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