Blackhaine: And Now I Know What Love Is
- Linda Isted
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Written, composed and choreographed by Blackhaine (Tom Heyes)
Manchester International Festival
Diecast, Ducie Street, Manchester
July 9-19, 2025; 1hr 50 mins
It’s been a grief-ridden few days. Only just recovering from the beautiful but desperately sad A Single Man, Manchester International Festival plunges us back into the darkest of dark places with And Now I Know What Love Is from Salford’s internationally-renowned visual artist, composer and choreographer Blackhaine.
Diecast is the kind of venue MIF loves – a big, old, decaying industrial space with holes in the roof and concrete flooring that comes with its own health and safety warning. A perfect match for Blackhaine’s Dystopian soundscape and doom-filled vision and choreography.
And before we go on, note that while this is a standing show, portable folding stools are available. One group put theirs in a circle and appeared to be having a picnic. Not quite the mood, but...
This is not an event for the fainthearted. The themes are bleak: life, existence and death in a world of desolation and despair. The mix of music and raw sound is harsh and reverberates to your core. We are given earplugs as we enter and are strongly advised to wear them; they are fluorescent and just add to the weirdness as they speckle the grey and foreboding mist swirling through the half-light of the venue.
The audience finds itself ebbing and flowing around the cavernous space, nervously making way for the black-clad zombie dancers in its midst.
In fact it is quite tricky at times to tell the dancers and their cameramen (who may or may not have been choreographed into the action) from the audience, such is the universality of all-black these days.
Much of the action takes place on the ground, as the dancers writhe and claw their way out of despair towards some kind of new beginning. This of course is also tricky, since only those members of the audience who find themselves at the edge of the action can see what is going on.
As for the rest of us, now thoroughly integrated into the piece, we are plunged into anxiety, and (in a piece which plumbs the most ancient of human terrors) into that most modern of states, the fear of missing out. The very essence of immersive theatre.
A rap sequence towards the end is riveting in performance but difficult to make out after the earlier aural onslaught; perhaps just my ears, but possibly not, if the faces around me were anything to go by. A shame, since Blackhaine’s words would probably have had as much impact as the sound and choreography.
The final mise-en-scene is a tree of life, which seems a little prosaic after all that has gone before. But it eases us back to a semblance of conventional performance, as the dancers entwine their way into relationships which we all fervently hope will bring them some peace.
More info and tickets here
