HYPOGEA is a cross‑aesthetic performance exploring grief, death, and mourning through the intersection of dance, sculpture, and music. It reimagines grief as a vital human experience and a ritual that gathers us in raw, messy, and uncontainable emotion. A wrestling with our inner underworlds, allowing sorrow to take shape without restraint, without ending.

At the centre of the work is clay, primordial matter that holds both the origins of life and its inevitable decay. Within this ever-changing landscape, mourning becomes physical, fragile, collective, imprinted in matter and memory. Scenes shift between sustained states of persistence and sudden eruptions of fury. Fragments of lamentations and ritual songs surface, dissolve, and return. A large relief sculpture of entangled bodies holds the space like a subterranean chamber of grieving creatures, liquid clay seeping from its cavities like sorrow leaking from the earth itself.

HYPOGEA invites us to remain with the intensity and uncertainty of mourning. For those who have passed, for ecologies collapsing, for uncertain futures. Grief, in its many facets, becomes a force that gathers us, forming new collective rituals where vulnerability is shared, where mourning becomes a source of connection, laying the groundwork for necessary transformation.

The term “hypogea” refers to subterranean structures such as burial chambers or catacombs. In this performance, it symbolises a metaphorical journey into the depths of the human emotions which are often hidden away.

Saturday Nov 22 at 17:00 we will invite the audience for a post-performance talk ‘Living with Endings – A dialogue on Grief, Death and Performance’ with Beyond Darkness and performance scholar Jonas Schnor