“A new space exists beyond.
It’s shimmering and it’s kind.
Don’t be afraid.
Death and rebirth.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”
WALK is an immersive performance by a powerhouse team of experimental creatives and an invitation into and through a dreamscape without coherent form. It is disturbing, compelling and otherworldly. The experience lingers.
Performer and Lead Creative, Bobby Russell embodies a battle fatigued figure and is accompanied by an impressively eerie and anxiety-inducing soundscape by Peter McAvan. The lighting design by Joe Lui accentuates how the darkness envelops Bobby’s character.
The set design by Opie Robinson is simple, surrealist and evocative. With a masterful use of movement, colour, textures, sound and light, WALK conveys a story of lonely wandering, confusion and haunting memories, then surrender, transformation, and new life.
WALK. Photography Jed Lyall.
As we enter the hall to the main theatre, blue fairy lights and a cotton shroud create a cloudy portal to an underrealm. The space is set up in an intimate semi circle with bean bags at the front. In the darkness and silence sounds emerge and stir and harsh sudden lights rattle the senses. A figure appears in the doorway. The journey begins.
Bobby’s precision of movement communicates their rage, desperation, sense of drowning and longing for a stolen innocence. They paint a picture of a tortured mind and of a desire to be gentle again. We bear witness to a dance with insanity that evokes emotion and catharsis.
A single monologue spoken in the dark, signals an end and a beginning. An acknowledgement of exhaustion and pain that allows for a transition into a new state, a new world, a new way of being; one that is ethereal, playful and colourful.
WALK. Photography Jed Lyall.
WALK is a story about many things: finding new life in what terrified and making new garments of what clothed monsters; clearing a space and standing tall on the mound of what brought one to ruin and observing the light from a new vantage point; finding oneself after collapsing into nothingness; finding new colours, new affection and holding them tighter than the ones known before; being and walking lighter; finally, launching into play and sass and power.
Ultimately, WALK is a story of transformation and rediscovering the joy of movement. It is a transfixing and uncomfortable performance that leaves the viewer with a message: “I believe in you”. If there is one thing this production will awaken in anyone who experiences it, it is the desire to dance.
WALK is on now at The Blue Room Theatre, until July 30.