Without Warning

This integrated arts production explores how movement, light and sound can be used as a language and offers the audience quite a sensory feast. Without Warning is a devised experiment, which visually describes and notates vulnerability, rage and resistance. Director, Lizzi Kew Ross’s inspiration stems from Brian Keenan’s autobiography, An Evil Cradling, and the choreography mirrors the compelling narrative’s themes with the most prominent being the erratic state of the human psyche when faced with desperate circumstances. 

The physicality and staging encourages the performers to revisit common concepts of fragmented relationships and oppressed emotion in an abstract and aesthetically striking way. Voice, strings and percussion investigate unconscious thoughts and feelings in tandem with the series of movement episodes. 

The Old Vic Tunnels prove to be the perfect backdrop for the promenade performance as the audience are unsettlingly meandered through the underground labyrinth while trains rattle overheard. Amongst the unsuspecting crowds, performers appear from all crevices solemnly wailing, sighing, singing and serenading. Musical instruments are dragged across the floor and screech eerily, echoing throughout the vaults. Flickering lights in peripheral vision become a godsend when plummeted into darkness and soon we're following the light for fear of being trapped in the shadows of these lost souls.

Jo Sutherland