Grief Will Be Our Companion borrows its title from a chapter in Lesley Head’s book Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, which explores the loss of future, the sense of doom and the encompassing anxiety taking over the affluent West because of climate change. Its striking opening image – Geir Hytten and Jakob Ingram-Dodd, silently wandering around the black box stage with transparent nylon backpacks full of grass and soil – is both dystopian and poetic. The only noise is the sound of water in the rubber boots one of them wears; the only object, an oversized black pillow – a Chekhov’s gun that will fire at the end of the piece. The performers face the audience, each other and the space in a series of minimal repetitive movements that seem fragile and powerless to stop the inevitable. The claustrophobic feeling is supported by a sound designer, hidden in the corner of the stage near the exit, whose presence slowly becomes audibly and visually prominent. 

For me the backpacks suggest oxygen tanks running out. By the end of the piece we see looming shadows on the wall, wet footsteps slowly disappearing on the dance floor, smoke and fog coming towards the audience, a blackout as aggressive industrial noises and low frequencies take over the pitch-black theatre space, sounds of incoming water created with the black pillow and compulsive inhalations. All these have become parts of a choreography from the end of the world that slowly yet inexorably tightens its grip.