Brighton Fringe 2012
Low Down
"Have you come alone? Were you followed? Press play precisely on the hour and the city you live in becomes a film-set." We are taken off site and the story begins in this audio-visual production that takes the audience off-site.
Review
To review this is to describe it and to describe it is to spoil it. And I’m not prepared to do that. So this is an evocative review to match a wonderfully mood-creating performance.
What we have here is a piece of off-site theatre that puts you, as audience member, into the centre of a world imagined, presented, recast and represented.
You’ll wear headphones, you’ll be taken somewhere and you’ll have an experience that will be as profound, affecting and moving as you are prepared to engage with it. It will be as deep as you are prepared to dive in.
In this piece "The world is your set."
There’s a disconnect in the conception and realisation of this work between the description and what we see, hear, feel and smell. But this I think is intentional. We experience a delivered soundscape, telling us what we see, and yet of course, we also experience what we are really seeing as well. This develops into the theatre of real life before us on the one hand, and the theatre being delivered into our heads via headphones on the other. There’s a modulation of convergence and divergence that wonderfully represents life. Our inner conversation is private, secret, even as we interact and engage with the world in an outer, visible interplay.
The privacy is almost complete until you pass close to a fellow audience member. This often raised a disconcerted smile of recognition of a stranger doing the same thing us ourselves.
We aren’t just passive here. We are invited to participate. At certain moments I did begin to feel like a character, at others, a performer, sometimes provoked into actions that push the comfort zone. At other times I’m invited to refresh my observation and then the unexpected begins to happen and I won’t spoil a breath of it for you. And this is a show where, we too, are on show.
I would have loved quieter moments and a little more "delay". Sometimes it feels too much like a script delivered. An ounce of silence here and there would have been more courageous. Performer, MIchelle Lediert has a serenity matched only by her charisma. She’s very affecting.
We are all on different journeys. We realise ourselves through those around us; they speak to us through our questions of them. This is an interactive, unique piece of off site work. Step into it. Press play, and be ready to play.
Show Website
Nova Pitch