Hug is an incredibly intimate experience, surpassing theatrics and the audience-performer dichotomy with a simple yet powerful device: you are hugged by the person who sings to you. Taking place with roughly 20 audience members and the same number of singers the effect is at once visceral and enveloping, as the combined voices in the room create a rich field of sound in which the performer holding you becomes a personal beacon.

There is the physiological effect of being held, the pleasure and comfort of the embrace, the directness of the performer’s attention, combined with the absence of external stimuli, as you are blindfolded, so that for the duration of the work you are immersed completely in the human voice.

Humanity is indeed the overwhelming feeling of the show, the power of communication and transference in the most loving sense of the artist as shaman or healer, as comfort and guide. The patterns generated by the shifting arrangements of voice, breath, and most powerfully for me the incredible sensation of another person simply humming against my chest, sweep you from the everyday into a dreamlike world of pleasure.

This is more than a show, it is a transportation, it actualises a state of being beyond the bounds of the language. Beautiful and generous, Hug is a reward for the soul.