During the 1920s, the French playwright Antonin Artaud devised a new mode of theatrical performance known as the Theatre of Cruelty. Believing that Western theatre had become stagnant and overly formalised, Artaud drew inspiration from Balinese dance performances to posit a theatre that emphasised intense and violent physicality, a preference for gesture and noise over speech, and the direct involvement of the audience. He hoped, in doing so, to remove the aesthetic distance between the performer and the audience, and involve the viewer in the art on the level of their most primal instincts.

It’s rare to catch a theatre of cruelty nowadays – they’re notoriously hard to stage, and quite difficult to pitch to funding organisations. However, in the back room of Diecast, a “creative neighbourhood” in the Northern Quarter (read: account executives buying two-for-one mimosas), Preston’s Blackhaine (real name Tom Heyes) is staging his one-of-a-kind performance And Now I Know What Love Is for the next fortnight.

The form suits Blackhaine like a glove. On wax, Tom Heyes concocts abrasive mixtures of drill, noise, and punk, but that’s only one half of his art. His live shows are intensely punishing, physical experiences: dancers move through the audience, contort on the floor, and work themselves into jagged seizure-like fits of flailing limbs. Collaborating with Manchester International Festival has afforded Heyes the opportunity to indulge this aspect of his art across a series of 90 minute performances.

The challenge of fully reviewing And Now I Know What Love Is is that the performance is never static. The dancers push through the crowd and into other rooms of the cavernous warehouse space, splitting into separate groups that the crowd must choose whether to follow, or linger on the margins. One of the real achievements of the show is the semi-unconscious corralling of the audience from one set piece to the next, while never revealing the guiding rails. There’s a low-ceilinged space where blinding backlights cast the performers in long shadows, a shipping container filled with overwhelming strobes. For the duration of the performance, we are part of the post-industrial nightmare world that Heyes has built.

Across his body of work, Heyes develops the same themes over and over to the point of obsessive perfection. There’s death, of course, and sickness that twists the body, and a kind of agonising love that sometimes seems indistinguishable from the other two. There’s the world that Blackhaine inhabits – a blighted, apocalyptic Northern landscape of industry and ash. And Now I Know What Love Is exists in this world too. It feels like a widescreen, heavily abstracted take on the themes and motifs of his 2021 EP And Salford Falls Apart, dropping most of the narration for a renewed emphasis on space and Butoh-influenced choreography.

The throughline of the performance is Heyes soundtrack, an impressive extended piece bearing all the hallmarks of Blackhaine’s style – tidal waves of distorted bass, turns of phrase repeated at first in a pained muttering then building over minutes into bludgeoning howls of anguish. At key points, the soundtrack recedes to silence and we are left alone with the gasps and grunts of the performers as they push their bodies to the limit, and the tension of the rapt audience. Relying on the fragility of silence is a bold move, especially given the notoriously poor conduct of audiences post-pandemic, but the proof is in the pudding: annihilating the aesthetic distance forces the audience into a deeper level of engagement with Heyes’ work.

And Now I Know What Love Is runs until 19th July.


EDITOR’S NOTE:

Manchester International Festival is sponsored by AVIVA plc, a company with links to UAV Engines, which in turn is owned by Elbit Systems – Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. STAT has unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people and vehemently opposes the on-going, Western-backed, genocide in Palestine. While we have taken the opportunity to review one offering of this year’s programming led by a North West artist, we also fully back the artists boycotting Manchester International Festival for its complicity in genocide.