Show On

Overview

Boxes are good for many things. Jewellery. Leftovers. Sealing away the trinkets of a doomed romance. Spare USB cables. One thing they're not good for is the arts. 'An art' will do this annoying thing where it squirms against the pressing of a lid, busting out to mix with all the others. And Performance Space, bastion of cross-disciplinary art, shoulders a hunk of the blame for the glorious mess that results.

The works under its roof combine music, dance, live cinema, story, animation, comedy and other practices to create things new and surprising. Its latest season, Show On, draws you into immersive, sensory experiences that by their nature can only be unlocked in real time.

In Aphids' strictly limited-capacity Thrashing Without Looking, it's the audience that creates the work (through the provocation of crowd dynamics — no awkward 'audience participation' with all eyes upon you here). Kitted with 'video goggles' that feed you live footage and potential cues, you mingle at a party that's bound to be the talk of the town.

Cool nomenclature combines with music, dance, storytelling, humour and animation in RRAMP: the Collector, the Archivist & the Electrocrat. Employing the romantically grotesque animation of Ahmarnya Price, it tells the story of the Collector, the tall lady-of-the-house, and the unsuspecting band members she recruits.

The chance to tap into terror without actual bodily danger is what keeps us returning to horror films and roller-coasters, but neither do it as pervasively, intimately, and thoughtfully as Tamara Saulwick in Pin Drop. Primarily using sound design, the Green Room Award winner for Outstanding Production awakens a catalogue of fears learnt through interviews with subjects aged six to 92.

Applespiel Make a Band and Take On the Recording Industry sees the collective transform into a band, cut an album, go on the road, and package the imaginary results in a live show that's described as a lethal cocktail of performance art, gig, and rockumentary. A manufactured non-band playing non-music — sounds oddly familiar, right?

There's more where that came from; peruse the full program here.