Director: Germaine Kruip
Musical Director: Hahn Rowe
Composers: Emily Howard and Hahn Rowe
Dramaturg: Bart van den Eynde
Lighting Design: Germaine Kruip and Rob Halliday
Assistant Director: Maxime Fauconnier
Producer: Manchester International Festival
Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester
Photographer: Duncan Elliott
“The performance/artwork, one of the most peculiar and extraordinary of this MIF25, blends sound and vision, on a quest to explore new connections between visual arts and architecture and to create inspiring immersive experiences.
“With A Possibility, Kruip continues her quest to explore both individual and collective perception, creating a liminal space to meditate, experiment with our senses and mind, and push the boundaries of art as we know it. The result of this experiment is a majestic artwork, where light itself becomes one of the main characters, and amalgamates with talented performers and composers to create a magical and ethereal experience.”
“The houselights dim and rise in waves, drawing attention away from the empty stage and into the large auditorium. A rectangle the size and shape of a cinema screen flickers like a film strip, recalling the black and white bars of Lis Rhodes’s seminal Light Music(1975), a work that invited the audience to become performers in a refigured, participatory cinema. As the speakers blast foghornlike drones, a tremulous disc of light is overlaid with wavering shadows until it resembles mist rolling across a full moon, conjuring the gothic imagery of phantasmagoria, cinema’s haunted precursor. When a blinding flash engulfs the theatre, the audience lets out a collective gasp.
“Using a limited arsenal of materials, A Possibility openly draws from histories of experimental cinema in order to reconsider the space of the theatre from the ground up.”
“Plunged into darkness for the most part, we had for some time been almost hypnotised by a series of almost living,breathing shadows and shapes, pulsating, fading in and out, some monolithic, some seemingly suspended and static; a foreign object whose very presence delivered a sense of unease and foreboding.
“It’s a rare moment to be devoid of light pollution and unsurprisingly unsettling, given the vulnerability it instils within us.”