In Abyss, the stage becomes a site of excavation—a place where a performer confronts their own body as if encountering unfamiliar terrain. Presented as a solo work co-created with a music producer, the performance abandons linear storytelling in favour of a visceral poetics built from light, sound, and fragile, flickering movement. What emerges is not a character study or a narrative arc, but a live meditation on existence itself: a body questioning, resisting, collapsing, and reassembling in real time.

At the heart of Abyss is the performer’s inquiry into “relationship”—a theme that, in their broader artistic practice, often concerns social and interpersonal dynamics. Here, however, the relationship under scrutiny is internal. The body is both subject and object, both witness and territory. The performance functions as a deep dialogue, not with an imagined other, but with the performer’s own physical presence. This shift inward gives the piece its arresting intimacy and its persistent, simmering tension.

The staging is deceptively minimal. A single flashlight, manipulated by the performer, becomes one of the work’s primary dramaturgical tools. When its beam sweeps across the audience, it disrupts the conventional hierarchy of spectatorship; when it turns inward, illuminating the performer’s face or torso, it creates a moment of self-exposure that feels almost forensic. Light in Abyss is not representational—it is interrogative. It searches, it confronts, it reveals what remains unspoken.

Sound, meanwhile, operates as an emotional accelerant. Designed in close collaboration with the performer, the score oscillates between low-frequency vibrations, fragmented pulses, and stretches of near-silence in which the performer’s breathing becomes the dominant sonic event. This soundscape frames the body’s movements as responses rather than expressions, as if the performer were continually recalibrating their existence against an invisible force.

The choreography, if it can be called that, embraces impermanence. Tremors, repetitions, and pauses form the core vocabulary of Abyss. Movements repeat not to communicate meaning but to test it—to see what remains, what disappears, and what transforms when the same physical gesture is performed under shifting internal states. The result is a structure that feels generative rather than predetermined. The performance seems to grow and dissolve simultaneously, never settling into a fixed identity.

What distinguishes Abyss in the landscape of contemporary performance is its embrace of incompletion. The work resists the polished finality often associated with solo theatre and instead foregrounds authenticity, chaos, and the productive potential of not knowing. There is courage in this choice. By refusing to offer resolutions, the piece invites the audience into an open system of meaning, one built not from narrative clarity but from shared vulnerability.

Ultimately, Abyss does not deliver answers to the existential questions it poses. Instead, it stages the necessity—and the difficulty—of asking them. The performance feels less like a statement and more like an ongoing process, a descent into selfhood that remains deliberately unfinished. In that unfinishedness lies its most compelling power: a reminder that the search for identity is not a destination but a continuous, ever-shifting act of becoming.