Showing @ Summerhall, Edinburgh until Sun 25 Aug @ 19:00
If you have ever lived next to a construction site or been woken at an antisocial hour by a bin lorry, you may not have very pleasant associations with industrial noise. With Ecstatic Arc, Robbie Thomson may just change your mind.
In this striking dystopian installation, the air hums with electricity and rings with clanging metal and twanging wires. Lights flash and strobe in time to harsh rattles, illuminated skulls dip and nod as if in conversation, metal rods sweep the ground, all leading up to the grand finale of the crackling caged Tesla coil. The disparate elements fit as neatly together as a choreographed dance and the music created, whilst not melodious by any classical standards, is surprisingly pleasing to the ear.
Ecstatic Arc demonstrates just how immersive a purely sensory, non-narrative theatrical experience can be. When the machines stutter to a stop, the lights come up and the applause gradually dies, the world outside seems far more disorientating than the machines that have just held us in thrall.
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