Rarely does theatre blow your mind like Tanglehead Production’s Ritual To Revolution, produced and directed by Rikki Tarascas. Performed on the closing weekend of the May Festival at St Andrew’s Church fringe venue in Brighton, the play is a far cry from the thespian normality of a theatrical stage production. Tarascas himself warned us in advance that this is “not a play”. Indeed this is not your conventional theatre production.

Combining live and recorded music, spoken word, contemporary dance and visual arts in a spectacularly original way, the performance is entirely site specific. Inspired by Gill Scott Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ the show set out to consider meaning in an over-communicated world.

Starting outside on Waterloo Street, whilst a hurried soundcheck takes place inside, the audience is unassumingly coaxed into being the participating actors of scene one, ‘Every Thing Is For Sale’. Our role is to participate in an auction within and in complete darkness, we are led inside by an estate agent with a torch. On the way we pass a homeless man in a sleeping bag in the doorway. A representation of the church’s position to once welcome the homeless and impoverished – the same vulnerable people that are nowadays locked out to fend for themselves on the streets, synonymous with the empty gestures of modern culture. Once the auction is over, we are invited to sit in the pews, as close to the front and to the middle aisles as possible.

We then get a roller coaster ride into the dark mind of Tarascas, who has pieced this performance together after thirty-five years of successfully directing, producing and performing across a variety of art forms – so who are we to argue? For Ritual To Revolution he has chosen to perform as a dark clown, opening with the speech “The revolution has been televised…” to the backing of a five-piece jazz band.

Utilising the whole space, a dancer appears from the back of the church and effortlessly leaps and bounds towards the stage – the only place, save the candlelight and projection screens, that is lit. Below spotlights, and using a see-through red scarf like a godly toreador, she wows us with her effortless movement.

What comes next is a series of ‘what the f*ck just happened?’ moments. Tarascas and a double act, dressed in Chaplain-like attire, busk on stage to one another’s annoyance and mime a fight that breaks their instruments. Shouting in a language that is quite frankly gibberish, their delivery is impeccable, humorous and well timed. All this is captivating, and set to the beat of the band who are largely performing an original score written by Tarascas and Elliot Spring, the band’s guitarist.

Around the stage, in the aisles and literally clambering over the pews at times, the performers in this multifaceted production astound us. As do the three video projections that form the backdrop of the set and reach into the high ceiling of the church, where at one point a 30ft Jesus Christ is projected to the loud sound of electronic dance music and colourful screensaver-style hypnotic graphics. These projections, in their location, seem to mimic the archaic projections made by the church’s stained glass windows.

There are clues to the underlying meanings of each act (‘Ritual’, ‘Commodity’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Chaos’, ‘Minotaur’, ‘Redemption’, etc), but unfortunately these titles aren’t released to us until afterwards.

At one climatic point towards the end a resistant bull (or Minotaur, as we now know) is dragged down the aisle pulled from the front of the stage with a long rope, struggling along its way through a puff of smoke. Sacrificed on the stage, the trophy head and horns of the beast are lifted high in front of another graphic and colourful projection. The mood then flips abruptly into silence, the lights are dimmed and we hear an evocative and graceful solo of Bach’s ‘Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major’.

There’s more dance and more projection, including an artist’s moving image piece, before the production turns full circle and ends with ‘Do Your Bidding’.

Although the performance will take a little while to fully sink, this is undeniably a whirlwind of visual and performative arts, dance, narration and music that’s ahead of its time. If this is a work-in-progress for bigger things to come, we’ll be on the lookout for the next venture from this award-winning theatre company.

St Andrew’s Church, Sunday 31st May 2015
Words and photos by Fran Moore