The recent Rapture prediction of the end of the world failed to materialise - as one headline put it, “Apocalypse not right now”. But in the same week when a tornado decimated the small Missouri city of Joplin, just weeks after an earthquake destroyed great swathes of Christchurch, New Zealand, and another put Japan on high nuclear alert, Wired Aerial Theatre stage an epic and stunningly realised portrait of the full-scale disaster we may be facing.
The world seems to be enduring a rolling sequence of catastrophes that may or may not be related to human interventions to our environment, but it has just been reported that an irreversible climate “tipping point” could occur within the next 20 years as the Arctic melts, and huge quantities of organic carbon locked away beneath it as frozen plant matter is released. So this show is very timely indeed.
Part very physical performance and part film, as aerial acrobats are suspended and crawl over a giant vertical screen that the stage becomes, and are dwarfed by the huge filmed images projected around them, this outdoor show is a lot more than mere spectacle. It does that rare thing - it makes you gulp with astonishment, but also think.
An endless parade of Hollywood horror movies make us anticipate the apocalypse, but this show gives it a vivid and visceral theatrical language that makes you feel it, too.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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