dives into a well of chthonic horror through a self-conscious layering of theatre and dance. It’s a subterranean quest narrative that quickly descends into cavern fever fuelled by fear of the dark, by claustrophobia, by the terror of being buried alive, or worse, of falling victim to some formless entity – hideous, predatory and bent on our destruction – spawned deep in the lightless underworld below our feet.
Hiring an expert caver to guide her, the woman braves the mysterious abyss hoping to find and rescue her sibling. What she discovers gets increasingly strange and terrible as the woman’s emotional distress and the psychological effects of sensory deprivation begin to bite and inchoate fears coalesce into the stuff of nightmare.
Aided by a cavernous set festooned with trapdoors and escape hatches, the dancers embody tormented, evanescent figures, their human forms dissolving and recombining to create grotesque and alien morphologies. It’s cleverly done – the movement is so protean and unstable you keep doing double-takes, as if you’d glimpsed something unspeakable in your peripheral vision.Theatre and dance don’t always dovetail as seamlessly as they could, though the design keeps visual and sonic thrills coming.
If there’s a criticism, it’s that the story doesn’t give us quite enough detail to mould the experience into a non-trivial allegory. Where H P Lovecraft went underground to dig up cosmic and existential horror, and C S Lewis for a travesty of Christian creation myth, the source of the angst here remains muddled, and could be further distilled.A cultural guide to going out and loving your city.
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