Exploring the importance of touch, the new show from leading digital performance innovators ZU-UK takes one audience member at a time through a journey from childhood to adulthood and old age through the medium of a bedtime routine. Within Touching Distance is a patient-led artwork, asking audiences to consider the ways that we interact at a sensory level with the world.
Question: How are we to treat others?
Answer: There are no others
-Ramana Maharishi
The seemingly unthinkable has occurred.
We have become those people from the remote places we see on our screens. Thrust into crisis and driven from our homes into uncomfortable proximity with others whom we had pretended to happily co-exist with but perhaps preferred to ignore, inside the Muster Station, our fragile prejudices and assumptions are exposed.
When wind and snow fill the sky and the fire has grown cold, relight the coals, warm the wine, and turn up the wick of the lamp. We enter these tales in the shadows of the night but hopefully emerge into daylight.
Written in China centuries ago, Pu Songling’s Strange Tales are now adapted for the stage by the acclaimed immersive theatre company Grid Iron in co-production with the Traverse Theatre.
The Ancient Greeks saw the world comprised of four elements – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (with Aristotle throwing in a fifth, Aether, for good measure) that were thought to explain the nature and complexity of all matter and to be essential to life. Times have changed. We now have atomic theory, with atoms classified into more than a hundred chemical elements. Yet echoes of the old theory reverberate to this day and scientists admit we still don’t know everything; there is still some mystery in our world.
Originally commissioned by New Diorama Theatre.
Co-produced by Brighton Festival and HOME Manchester.
Supported by China Plate, Corn Exchange Newbury, The New Wolsey Theatre and Redbridge Drama Centre.
The Tempest was performed at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the winter 2016-17 season before moving to the Barbican Theatre in London. It was created in collaboration with Intel and in association with The Imaginarium Studios.
Draw Me Close blurs the worlds of live performance, virtual reality and animation to create a vivid memoir about the relationship between a mother and her son charting twenty-five years of love, learning and loss . Weaving theatrical storytelling with new forms of technology, the individual immersive experience allows the audience member to take the part of the protagonist, Jordan, inside a live, animated world.
Virtual reality dance in the Gallery
How can dance interpret and respond to our paintings and architecture?
How can movement animate our space and art and help us see both in new ways?
How can we share the experience of watching a live dance performance in the Gallery with people who live far away?
Watching dance is often a passive experience with one fixed point of view. We set about creating an immersive and visceral experience, allowing the audience to explore dance from all viewpoints, creating their own flow within the choreography.
Marina Abramović’s Rising (2018) addresses the effects of climate change by transporting viewers to witness rising sea levels.
Wearing an immersive headset, viewers enter an intimate virtual space, where they come face-to-face with the artist, who beckons from within a glass tank that is slowly filling with water from her waist to her neck.
