COME REST IN CHAOS (2024-5)

Do you ever feel at odds with those around you? Have you ever wanted to both belong and be left alone at the same time? Do you ever find yourself relating to different perspectives on the same truth?

Using live performance, film and illusion, Come Rest in Chaos creates four distinct sensory worlds inside the theatre, amongst which four performers dance, sometimes beside you and sometimes across from you. As they compose a rhythmic journey through intimacy, conformity and conflict, you’re invited to follow your curiosities through the space and make choices about how you want to be an audience member. A live-responsive soundscape adapts to these decisions.

Come Rest in Chaos is a multi-sensory world where the audience’s agency is dramaturgically central to the work. It has been described by past audiences as “mesmerising”, “playful”, “haunting” and “brilliant.”

Presentations

17th July 2025 : Bradford 2025 Festival, Presented by Kala Sangam

18th - 19th October 2025 : Nottdance Festival, Presented by FABRIC Nottingham

This show is available for booking Winter 2026 - Spring 2027. Please get in touch for more information.

Creative Team

Artistic Direction: Shivaangee Agrawal

Film, Music, Projection Design: Tom Shennan

Collaboration / Performance: Yamina Lyara, Ajani Johnson-Goffe, Meera Patel, Amanda Pefkou, Takeshi Matsumoto, Jane Chan

Rehearsal Direction: Jane Chan

Costume: Sanna Namin, Shivaangee Agrawal

Production Management: Tom Robbins

Production: Elsabet Yonas, Metal & Water

Partners: FABRIC Nottingham, Kala Sangam, The Place, Ugly Duck, The Albany, ACE

If you’re interested in how we’ve built the show and in having a more detailed insight into what you can expect, do attend the pre-show access session and touch tour in Nottingham, which takes place just before the morning show begins, and is led by trained audio describer and creator of the work, Shivaangee. Here are some of her key reflections:

World Building

Come Rest in Chaos creates four distinct sensory worlds inside the theatre, inhabited by four performers and roaming audience members. Building these worlds over the past 3 years has been one of the most satisfying elements of making this show, and integral to it being an “immersive” performance. 

To really transport the audience into another location, time and atmosphere, has required a coherent and rigorous design across spatialised soundscapes, live vocalisation, costume, characterisation, projections, film and crucially, how audience members are using the space over the course of the show. 

At points I’ve built this outwards from the choreography, and at other times the choreography has been built within this world. The result is that all these elements have become mutualistic to a degree where we can no longer remember what came from what. This world-building process has made me ever more excited about what dance can do for us when we aren’t relying on it to do everything. 

Durational Scores and Time Cycles

Come Rest in Chaos features four performers, who dance sometimes beside you, sometimes across from you and sometimes around you. Over the course of the performance, they turn from strangers to companions to friends to community and back again. 

The choreography is built from improvisational scores that I’ve been researching over the past 5 years, curious how specific collective dancing frameworks can enable specific relationships with each other. I like to call this ‘relational virtuosity’, a practice of relating to each other that we’ve been refining carefully, that is felt by the audience as something spectacular. 

In research periods, I’ve guided these scores over long periods of time, curious about what happens to our internal experience of a dance when we do it over 5 mins, then 20, then 40, then over an hour. As a result, I’ve developed a theory of change that tracks how our relationships (with people, with places, with ourselves) cycle and orbit around the same five states again and again. 

This way of working has required immense patience, trust and introspection from the performers. I feel extremely privileged to work with them. 

Audience Experience and Interaction

Come Rest in Chaos is a multi-sensory world where the audience’s agency is dramaturgically central to the work. As an audience member, you roam through the space and make choices about where you want to experience each part from. 

The action looks very different from different viewpoints, because we've designed the hanging gauze to be at times opaque (forms a visual backdrop and blocks off other parts of the space from view), translucent (the visuals merge with what's in front and behind to create illusions of what's real and what's projected), or transparent (disappears so that you can see far into the space). Sometimes one piece of the fabric can be a combination of all of these options, so that you can only see through a section of the gauze, prompting you to move once again. 

This means that you can come to the show with a companion and see quite different performances. When building the narrative arc, we've mapped out many of these possibilities but there are definitely more to discover. 

We've paired this relatively gentle participatory experience with invitations for more direct participation, where you can play with what's being projected in the space, and how the performers move through it. I'll leave you to discover that part in the show.