Ways of Knowing at Underbelly Cowgate – Edinburgh Fringe review

It’s rarely a good omen when the first impulse after leaving a theatre is reach for your phone and Google what you’ve just seen. Emergency Chorus’s Untapped Award-winning Ways of Knowing poses as meditation on mankind’s compulsion to forecast the future from the meteorological to the mystical. In execution, it’s a scrappy collage of imagery and ideas, loosely stitched together by Clara Potter-Sweet and Ben Kulvichit’s surreal mix of choreography and soundscapes.

Split into two halves, Ways of Knowing maps the ways in which humans have sought to predict the future. The first half lingers on the weather: a Victorian eccentric claims his newfangled contraption, consisting of leeches in jars, can divine tomorrow’s skies. Potter-Sweet narrates, donning thick specs and an oversized beard, whilst Kulvichit nonchalantly sprays water from above. From there, the work dissolves into dreamlike movement sequences, punctuated by hypnotically repeated weather reports and bursts of deafening low-pitched warbles. There’s a strong but overhandled sense of impending existential terror.

The second half, “Splunking”, relocates to a cave system. Potter-Sweet and Kulvichit stumble through a darkness washed stage until they encounter a bearded druid, Peter the Hermit, a supposed clairvoyant. More throbbing noises shake the room before a jump cut to an interview. Instead of delivering transcendental prophecy, Peter bathetically spouts corporate jargon.

With some imaginative stretching, you can discern criticism of how the bloodless arithmetic of corporate thinking has smothered our mystical, metaphysical instincts. Gone are the quacks and boffins, in with the spreadsheets. Technology has made machines of us all. But the piece meanders listlessly, so that by the time it seeks to tie its ideas together, the audience has already drifted away.

There is, with tighter focus, the potential to mine something deeper beneath the surface (a prediction of my own) especially with Potter-Sweet and Kulvichits’ charming sense of deadpan humour. But for now, Ways of Knowing remains too much a work in progress to cohere into more than the sum of its disparate parts.