A disability-led double bill that places bodies, technology, and voice under sustained scrutiny sometimes as provocation, sometimes hesitantly, and often with striking visual ambition.

ABILITOPIA proposes a live encounter between humans, artificial intelligence, and art. A robot shares the stage with three performers, Duncan Armstrong, Raven Afoa-Purcell, and Julie van Renen, situating the work within contemporary debates about authorship, agency, and the seductions of techno-futures. At its strongest, the piece resists spectacle, grounding itself in live sound, embodied presence, and the fragile immediacy of performance.

Early sections, however, lean heavily on explanation. Spoken text establishes the conceptual terrain so thoroughly that it leaves limited space for imaginative or empathetic entry. Gesture and sound operate with delicacy, yet are over-determined by description. One performer, working without sound, remains positioned at the edge of the stage in an isolated pool of light. He is visibly present, though curiously under-activated in relation to the collective energy unfolding elsewhere. The effect is less dialogue than his containment.

Questions around disability performance surface implicitly. When virtuosic movement is juxtaposed with physical stillness, the contrast invites reflection, though not always with clarity. Rather than fully destabilising assumptions about ability, the staging occasionally exposes an unresolved hierarchy of motion, an awkwardness the work seems aware of, even if not yet able to interrogate in depth.

There are moments of synchrony and precision, particularly in the tension between Kristian Larsen’s soundscape and the mid-section of Armstrong’s fluid solo. Yet as the work progresses, technology increasingly claims the affective centre. Filmic interventions are beautifully realised, extracting movement into screen-based form, but in doing so, they subtly displace the improvisational immediacy promised at the outset. The performers remain present, fully themselves, but the screens begin to do the work of the performance’s becoming.

WHITE NOISE arrives with less declaration and more insistence. Emerging from Alisha McLennan Marler’s lived experience as a disabled mother, the work opens abruptly and cacophonously, pulling attention without preamble. Spoken word is personal, poetic, and unguarded. Movement carves clear trajectories through space while sound becomes both texture and provocation, as a microphone strikes wheelchair wheels like symbolic sonar, graffiti-like marks scored into the air.

Here, technology operates less as spectacle and more as amplification. Live sound manipulation exposes re-membered rhythms and pressures, while Bradley Gledhill’s lighting and set design offer something distinct from the algorithmic presence of ABILITOPIA. His contribution is spatial, theatrical, and materially felt. Light and image shape attention rather than compete for it, supporting a performance that is direct, intimate, and unapologetically subjective.

Motherhood functions not as metaphor but as method, structuring the work through interruption, repetition, and insistence. Tenderness sits alongside abrasion; a soft humility punctures gravity. Real, lived exhaustion is neither hidden nor aestheticised. The audience is implicated, though with less assumption and more invitation than in the preceding work.

Across both pieces, there is a visible negotiation between dance and physical theatre, between symbol and sensation, between live presence and its digital double. Technology pushes forward not simply as a tool but as a proposition, somewhat sharpening our encounter with Touch Compass and our expectations of its endurance, sometimes obscuring it. A tighter edit across both works could bring us closer to the strong visual direction the company is clearly pursuing, allowing relational complexity to unfold with greater plasticity.

What lingers is not the spectacle of technology, but the human body negotiating its place, searching for compass, hinting at a depth the work only begins to touch, and to touch us watching.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer