Shadowplay at CONTINUUM Festival | LONDON
Shadowplay is a live literature experiment in sensory deprivation. Suspended in a dark auditorium, the audience are alone save for white words projected into the pitch black canvas. Around them a soundtrack emerges, scoring urgent scenes told in broken, staccato sentences. It is a story about the power of language to make reality and, inevitably, undo it.
Shadowplay is a unique performance; a post-apocalyptic fable composed of nothing but written word and a thunderous, dystopian soundscape improvised by sound artists Reuben and Jacob Kyriakides. The brothers perform using found objects and physical instruments, processed live into an intense soundworld of mounting tension and release. In the darkness a small, low voice sounds; it may be the last voice left. You will strain to hear it.
Situated between surrealism, literary allusion and survival horror, the piece ventures beyond post-truth into a post-meaning world, where language itself begins to unravel. As the constructed world undoes itself the narrative follows, fading into aphasia – sibilance and antonym colliding. Threads snap between truth and reality, between signifier and signified: a future fiction all the more prescient in our current climate, where facts become irrelevant and past voices of dissent – satire, reason, inquiry – are losing power to effect.
CONTINUUM is a three-day multi-disciplinary festival from 21st – 23rd June 2017, produced by second year Theatre Practice students from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. Anchored in the present, future remains a distant concept that inevitably eludes our reality. CONTINUUM: a performance festival of future futures deconstructs the concept of future and its implications on us as individuals and collectives across time and space.
Where
Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club
42-44 Pollard Row
London
E2 6NB
When
Thursday 21st June 2017, 5pm
£8 day pass | £16 festival – tickets