COME REST IN CHAOS (2023-5) and THE HOPE LOOP (2026-7) : Mixed Reality and Immersive Live Performance Works
“I was taken on a dream odyssey, I’m not sure I finished in the same reality I started in”
“My highlight of Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture. Stunning, unique, unforgettable.”
COME REST IN CHAOS (Touring)
‘Come Rest in Chaos’ is a one-hour immersive experience that creates four distinct sensory worlds inside the theatre, amongst which live and filmed performers dance, sometimes beside you and sometimes across from you. As they compose a rhythmic journey through star-studded nights, humid kitchens, dense forests, and blaring dreamscapes, you are invited to follow your curiosities and compose your own version of events. A live-responsive soundscape and live-modulated projections beckon you this way and that - you decide how you want to be an audience member, how you can find kinship in conflict, autonomy within conformity, rest within chaos.
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.” Click here to download the Tour Pack for 2027-8.
Presentations
17th July 2025 : Bradford 2025 City of Culture Programme , Presented by Kala Sangam | 18th - 19th October 2025 : Nottdance Festival, Presented by FABRIC Nottingham | 11th November 2023: Rich Mix, London
Creative Team & Partners
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; Stage Management: Jane Chan; Costume: Sanna Namin; Production Management: Tom Robbins. Partners FABRIC Nottingham, Bradford Arts Centre, The Place, Ugly Duck, The Albany, Arts Council England; Produced in 2024-5 by Elsabet Yonas (Metal & Water); With thanks to Strike A Light Gloucester and Rich Mix for support during early development.
THE HOPE LOOP (In Development at The Ashton Digital Suite, Jerwood Dancehouse / DanceEast in 2026)
The Prototype
In the Ashton Digital Suite at DanceEast, we built and tested a prototype for the work, which took the following format:
Format: Multi-screen immersive and interactive installation
Space: 8m x 8m, including audience orbiting
Install: Central living room space that is homely, comfortable and safe, surrounded by outside orbiting area with projection screens (TVs in the prototype)
Duration: 25 min
Audience size: 5 - 20 people at a time
Cast of Performers: 2-3 dancers, on film with certain activated performances live
Experiments for an immersive + interactive audience experience
Technology tested:
Depth-sensing cameras monitor orbiting audience members, to change / intensify in response lighting, sound, playback
Playback modulation through touch-designer to include speed, night/day colouration, disappearing / appearing of characters
A delayed live camera playback screen obscures and distorts real activity in the space
The vision for audience experience:
They roam in an environment that mirrors the motional states of performers
Their intuitive understanding of time is collapsed when orbiting
They are able to change the visual worlds by leaning in and out
Audience Testing: 3 different focus groups
We had a discussion with each focus group after their experience. We found that the work particularly resonated with three kinds of audience members:
Those who feel the political situation is worsening and that it feels hopeless, such as those emotionally affected by international inaction over climate change, the rise of the far-right in the UK, the erosion of marginalised identities in the public sphere
Those who enjoy choice-making and reflection when experiencing art
Those with chronic health issues, and who regularly experience cyclical health
For the work’s future development, we were inspired to:
Work with local archivists in each location to frame the narrative in relation to the cycles of challenge and celebration in local history.
More About the Making of Come Rest in Chaos in our “Audience-Centric” Methodology
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.