Showing @ Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh until Mon 25 Aug @ 17:15
It is 20 years on from the invention of cerebral implants which allow you to communicate without words. The state is one of repression and control – everyone is being watched, not only from the outside but from within their minds. Light offers a dark perspective of the future in a spectacularly luminous form.
Its theme is not new. While paying hommage to the original of its kind, George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is inspired by the same paranoia present in sci-fi films of the millennia, (The Matrix and The Minority Report), and more recently Charlie Brooker’s Channel 4 series, Black Mirror. It centres on the technology-gone-wrong dilemma. Technology which had the potential for good but, harnessed by the rich and powerful, has become a tool of oppression. In a contemporary society that is increasingly dominated by technology which both structures and surveils our lives this is particularly topical: with the emergence of Facebook and Apps like Instagram, we live in a world in which our photos, thoughts, feelings, are legally not our own.
Theatre Ad Infinitum repackages these issues in a unique production, appealing to ‘the universal language of the body’. It shuns the very linguistic medium upon which society, social media and mainstream communication is based, reverting back to a more instinctive mode. Seamless in its choreography, this phosphorescent show transports its audience forward in time while demanding we tap into a more intuitive understanding. The effect is that of lucid dreaming: half-awake, half-asleep we are drawn into this mesmerising performance.