In 1971 photographer David Hamilton caused a stir by releasing a book, Dreams of a Young Girl, filled with nude, or almost nude, soft-focused and dreamy images of teenage girls on the brink of adulthood. Looking at them now, they still provoke an uneasy tension – the likes of Nabokov’s Lolita, and the films Leon and the Virgin Suicides, spring to mind.

Director Lies Pauwels, from Antwerp’s Hetpaleis, was inspired to create what is an arresting, funny and emotional response to Hamilton’s book. He has assembled an astonishing cast of 13-year-olds (13 of them) who perform alongside a bearded bodybuilder to create a fascinating piece of tanztheater that wryly provokes, startles, and induces tears.

Faux Greek columns decorate a stage alongside a life-size plastic horse and a canvas of a Romantic landscape below a rainbow of teddy bears and fairy lights. The cast marches towards us dressed as air hostesses, the clip-clop of their heels creating a bold statement of intent. They are in charge. Lined up along the barrier between stage and audience, they pass a microphone one by one to calmly introduce themselves as Gift, Prudence, Memory, Lovely – a series of words that recall the adjectives often used to describe girls. One voice takes over. in an instant, she veers from the rules of the auditorium’s invisibility to ask wider questions: ‘Are there any paedophiles here? We don’t mind. We just want to know what we’re up against,’ she says defiantly as her colleagues stare at us.

Over an hour and forty minutes we’re whisked through a series of episodes in which the cast transform from schoolgirls in pleated green skirts, to Harajuku Girls in white frills and brightly coloured wigs. The piece is littered with arresting images that burn into your brain: a tall blonde with a litter of yappy neon toy dogs on leads wrapped around her wrists; a chorus of hair swishing up and down in unison (Pina Bausch would be proud); limp bodies being whisked along the floor into a heap. One girl dances Sia’s Chandelier music video to perfection whilst the others look on dismissively puffing on e-cigarettes. Another shrieks and slaps the floor with such anguish that I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She channels the most tragic pain only a metre from my face. The moment brims with the emotional and physical suffering of thousands of young women and girls. This performance demands attention.

The body builder’s presence shifts from bodyguard, to father figure, to potential lover or abuser. It’s darkly hilarious to see an almost naked man flash his Adonis-like body to the crowd, seeking approval within a sea of young girls who are turning into objectified bodies themselves. He can flip them upside down with a wave of his hand but it’s when he tenderly lifts a young girl with a physical disability he becomes a tender carer. He enables her to fly, to live in the spotlight that for most of her life will be reserved for the ‘pretty’ girls. It’s a devastatingly beautiful moment, perfectly orchestrated. And she looks like she’s having a whale of a time. In fact, the entire company, with their coquettish glances and defiant stares, all seem to be having the time of their lives performing this ambitious and utterly compelling piece of work.

It’s a rainy evening, a funereal grey sky broodily tipping it down – as befits an outing to a cemetery. We could be extras in a film about the undead. As night falls, we are led off into the woods in a silent procession. As we go deeper, feet tramping through mud, twigs crackling beneath our tread, it does feel genuinely spooky. What a beautiful site this is! Ancient tombstones leaning into each other, desolation angels gazing to the sky with their blank stone eyes, gnarled trees and tangled ivy dripping with rain. We are under a direct flight path from London City Airport, and the planes fly low above us – but I like this, and I like the distant roar of the cars on Mile End Road, and the lights on in the tower blocks nearby, which we can see through the trees on some paths. I enjoy the out-of-time lurch of the quiet of the dead and the bustle of the living; the odd feeling of being out of time, of being in another dark, mysterious world so close to the everyday reality of East End life.

And what do we encounter, here in this woody graveyard? There is some beautiful work from the Circa team of seven acrobats – Nathan Boyle, Marty Evans, Nicole Faubert, Bridie Hooper,Todd Kilby, Brittanny Portelli and Lewis West – who are accompanied and supported by a baker’s dozen of students from the National Centre for Circus Arts (which I’m afraid some of us will call Circus Space for evermore). We get a number of skilful circus set-pieces in the woods, and a great large-scale ensemble piece as a finale.

The set-pieces include a Chinese pole act and a hand-balancing act, both of which feel a little restrained by the rain, and a cyr wheel act that is so completely stymied by the wet floor surface that it really should have been cut, or there perhaps there could have been some sort of plan B for that space, as the puzzled audience is left watching someone just bouncing his hoop on the ground for 10 minutes, which is rather odd. The aerial work fares better in the bad weather. There’s a fabulous rope act: two cordes lisses hanging down ominously from an enormous tree; a pair of performers, one male, one female, a rope apiece. He draws our attention, but she holds her own. The final image of their scene is stunning – she is in hanged man pendu pose, the rope tightly wound around her ankles; he is upright, with the rope wound around his eyes and face. There’s also a lovely aerial piece using straps – this time a trio, a lead performer in a silky blue dress and a chorus of two follows or echoes who are dressed in colourless outfits that give them an almost-naked look – their contortions suggesting souls in purgatory twisting and turning.  I enjoy this pattern of having a more experienced Circa performer upfront, taking the larger share of the audience’s attention but leaving room for the students to show their strengths. Trudging the dark pathways en route between the main performance pieces, we see figures gently swinging on trapezes, hanging from ropes, or dancing on graves. The dancing is courtesy of students from the Central School of Ballet, who are given their own set-piece in a very lovely scene that sees six or seven of them in a line, a grave each, dancing an elegantly angsty choreography to a soundtrack (composed/designed by Lapalux); the row of (female) figures twisting and turning, raising their arms to the heavens, and tossing their hair to a disjointed, rewound, overlapped mash up of musics and ethereal sounds, like a symphony of transistor radios broadcasting from other worlds. Movement and costume-wise, it’s the only section of Depart that has something of the Victorian Romantic aesthetic that might have been the obvious design choice for the piece. Costume design, overall, is a little bit erratic – but maybe that is inevitable with such a large cast of mixed professional, student and community performers.

There is another element I haven’t yet mentioned: a live choir who start the show, end the show, and accompany us along the way – scores of shrouded faceless black figures standing awaiting us as we turn a corner, or walking amongst us singing. The effect is spoilt a little by the rather mundane LED lanterns in their hands – a minor point, as generally I like the choir and the way it is used.

But this leads to a reflection on the use of lighting in the piece, which seems to miss a trick. Lighting designer Lee Curran is a highly experienced artist, but I wonder if his experience extends to outdoor arts? Compared to other large-scale processional outdoor works in dark and evocative places – WildWorks’ Wolf’s Child, seen at Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2016, springs to mind – the lighting is uninspiring. So many points along the way that could have been lit beautifully, and weren’t lit at all… Perhaps the desire was to keep the darkness intact on the walk between the set pieces; to keep us feeling disoriented in this space that wasn’t, actually, that enormous a site for three interweaving audience groups – but I felt the stone angels and plinths were begging for some illumination. The tombstones got more attention – some of them, anyway – used as a site for video work by Ben Foot and Valentina Floris: projections of little white figures fluttering on the graves, or of flowers having their petals slowly unpicked.

I also feel – and this may well have been the rain dictating, perhaps it was different on other nights – that we are hurried along throughout the journey, with some rather too enthusiastic stewarding from some people. Although not all – a big thumbs-up to the auburn haired young woman leading our ‘yellow’ group – she doesn’t wear a raincoat, standing tall and proud in the rain in her smart suit, always gently friendly, waving us on calmly with a feint smile on her face – I believed in her as a character, be it funeral usher, or guardian of the underworld.

A gold star also to Circa for setting down the ground rules for this journey: walk in silence; do not take photos; follow the path and keep walking. Such a relief to have silence observed, and no-one viewing the work through a lens. We are also advised to ‘look up, don’t look back’. This last directive is a nod in the direction of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, whose story seems to lurk under the surface of Depart – although the piece is thematic and poetic rather than a linear narrative.

Circa’s Depart is, if we are being anorak-y about definition, a site-generic work. By which I mean, it is not specific to this one site, it has been created in response to a genre of sites – graveyards – and will tour to other graveyards, where it will be reworked for each new site. It has been co-commissioned by LIFT, Brighton Festival, and Hull Freedom Festival, and will be presented in Brighton and Hull in those respective festivals in 2017.

In conclusion: Depart is a rich experience, full of inspiring performance work – the student and community performers integrated into the piece with care and respect. Hats off to an amazing team of artists and technicians  for pulling off such a complex work. Not all the elements cohere all the time, yet as the first version of a very ambitious outdoor work, this is inevitable. I’m looking forward to seeing it again next year…

Created by Brooklyn based artist Andrew Schneider, YOUARENOWHERE has toured internationally to great renown. Its UK appearance is a collaboration between Gate Theatre, Shoreditch Town Hall and LIFT 2016.

YOUARENOWHERE is exactly how I feel right now. Fingertips poised above the keyboard trying to articulate a response to something out of this world…

At the start of the show, a lone male performer bundles about, blurting out introspective musings, memories and facts. I pick up love and death as revolving themes that are tangled in the nexus of time, reality, parallel universes and the theory of relativity.

A hairy chest, droplets of sweat, sparkling eyes seem at odds with the degrading white makeup and battery packs strapped to his arms. The cold, stark space, often flooded with blue or white light, heightens his humanness, his flesh and blood. A foot-wide square of LED light hangs centrally and offers a window, or perhaps a loophole, into this strange mechanical no man’s land. He sings and jokes as he contemplates love, death and science. The audience is bombarded with facts and thoughts chopping and changing in tone and tempo. We are plunged into this other world, disorientated by fast changing, frantic speech and sudden and terrifying changes in lighting states with soundscapes that rumble our chairs.

Schneider is often stopped in his tracks by an acknowledged stage manager and tech team somewhere up in the gods. Linear narrative begins to be deconstructed as he is told to speed up, or flooded in darkness, blacking out himself and re-entering his monologue at new moments or new physical places on the stage. As the show progresses, and the technology takes an alarming precedence, it feels like Schneider, the show and the audience are at the mercy of some higher being.

A video demonstration of simultaneity is sped up and played in two frames creating a diptych is sped up and played in two frames, creating a diptych. This constant challenging of the audience with speed, information overload, and the questioning of our knowledge is applied to every element of the work. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is cleverly used to pose the notion of multiple realities.

If a man watches a moving train struck by lightning at the front and back, and a woman watched the lightning from the inside, the man will see both lightning strikes at the same time, and the woman will see one before the other. The result of special relativity demonstrates that from different reference frames, there can never be agreement on the simultaneity of events, and thus both interpretations are correct.

This concept sets the premise for us to legitimately consider that time and reality are not necessarily as we know it. We are emotionally engaged with Schneider and open to the idea of experiencing multiple realities. We are now putty in his hands. The team are meticulously precious about spoilers for the next section, so I will carefully skirt around it. Primed for new realities and parallel universes, the audience and Schneider are confronted by a new presence, which is unsettling, dark and subtly threatening beneath the humour that unfolds. Key moments in life and death and near-misses that change the course of history are explored. The revelations reinforce the already established emotional engagement between Schneider and the audience. As an exercise in timing, cues, and stage-teching the work is an impeccable demonstration. At one point we are advised that ‘it easier if you don’t think of time as being linear’, I heed that advice for my befuddled brain, grappling with the idea of being ‘nowhere’ and ‘now here’ at the same time.

Repetition of image, and dislocation of time is abundant and in every detail. From the LED window reflected in eyes that are like a gateway to the soul, to the increased tempo of the timer displayed, counting down towards a crescendo. Speech is played backwards and memories projected forwards. Everything is the same but different.

You will laugh, you will gasp, you will question your existence, you might even cry as you realise that everything works towards a given point, but not a given time. This point marks the end.

YOUARENOWHERE straddles art and science in theme and form. Schneider is a true artist, he challenges the human condition simply by asking questions and exploring the ‘what if’s’ within the framework of science. He also challenges theatre by doing the same. Evolving from playing with stage tech and its capabilities, he applies his mastery of technology to the making process, finding intuitive and emotive content that he can make possible with those tools. Moments where blackouts make you jump, to a starscape that brings tears to the eyes, truly exemplify how much can be achieved with lighting and sound.

You might be left with the lingering thought of everything working towards one single point in life – death. You might walk away trying to unravel how each feat in technology and each surprise was accomplished. You might contemplate whether that lightning bolt was meant for two people at one time who are destined to find each other on their journey. However you engage with YOUARENOWHERE, it will be long lasting as you continue to interrogate your experience of the show after you leave the auditorium.

No neat folding of T-shirts here. Toco Nikaido and her fearless, 33-strong troupe are going to turn the theatre into a playground and give us all a ‘happy, hysterical time’. So for 45 intense and colour-saturated minutes they bombard the audience with sound, light, dance and liberally flung stuff. It’s messy, loud, thrilling and exhausting to witness. We get very wet.

Nikaido wants to make performance that resonates with young people and shares their ‘genki-ness’ (which roughly translates as energy and liveliness). Part political rally, part rave, Extreme Voices uses J-pop tunes, a chorus-line and projections of manga-style graphics and slogans (my favourite being ‘nommal [sic] theatre is boring’) to create a high-octane pastiche of Japanese youth culture. The music is fast, beat-heavy and lip-synched: it’s weird when performers are sitting on your lap and miming lyrics; they are so physically present throughout it seems odd not to hear them too. But it frees them to focus on the complex business of performing this show, which they do with an amazing level of skill.

Choreography is whip-tight: lots of symmetrical tableaux and ensemble movement, blending Japanese and Western dance-styles, as cheerleader pom-poms and knee-socks give way to bondage undies. As for props, the theatre is riddled with plastic buckets holding confetti, balls, flowers, seaweed and water – gallons of water, which is flung with glee at the rain-poncho’d audience. The on-stage picture is similarly dense. Songs are performed behind life-size Russian dolls, there are light-sticks galore including some shaped as leeks, there’s a song about technology – ‘who controls the future, who controls the past?’ – during which big cut-outs of monsters romp about. The energy is infectious and the anarchy controlled. Through very cleverly directed movement flow everyone gets to the right place in time for the next costume change, the next lighting effect, or the next audience invasion.

Whilst it’s the power of the pack that impresses most, it is Amanda Waddell, a Texan long-resident in Tokyo, who leads the singing and what there is of narration, in English. She brings a touch of the rodeo to the mix and is a powerful presence, skewing the ‘otherness’ a wholly Japanese cast would offer, perhaps as a symbol of America’s growing influence on their aspirations.

Extreme Voices is an extreme spectacle, beautiful to watch and hugely photogenic. It hurtles along blazing with noise, colour, energy and perpetual smiles. The audience is encouraged to clap and sing, and punch the air, and finally invade the stage, but there’s not the space, or the time, or the health and safety permission, to fully let go and be as genki as our hosts. That’s part of the tease: being tempted by the toys and glitter, the lights and fleeting fame enjoyed by these bright young things, yet firmly held at arms length. But how I wished to be less of a spectator. I’ve no doubt Nikaido and her crew could make easy work of channeling an audience to properly be part of the action. Be careful what you wish for…