Exhilarating on the inside, incomprehensible on the outside, the mosh pit is one of the phenomena at gigs that splits opinion.
Next to inexplicably talking all the way through despite having spent your hard-earned cash on a ticket, watching the whole concert through your phone screen while recording something you’ll never watch back, or standing at the front despite being 7ft tall, it’s probably the divisive type of behaviour and the one that is most likely to see you getting injured.
It can be brutal. And Rachel Ní Bhraonáin’s five-person performance piece about the “meaning behind the chaos” seeks to explore all of that.
Representing different types of mosh pit participants, each performer gives a series of short monologues inbetween dance and movement that represents both the individual and collective experience.
It is described as a “passive aggressive hug… a smack and a kiss at the same time” by those who find an outlet and community in the pit. For others it seems to be a power trip; an exercise in overriding chaos theory to influence the actions of the crowd, likened to vibrating gas molecules that dart around and collide.
Performed at Epic Studios as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival the show does make use of the space but that itself presents a challenge. There is too much distance to really capture the closeness and intensity of the pit, and some of the dance – while dazzlingly executed – feels too fast and moves too far.
It is an interesting piece of folk history but feels like perhaps something more suited to film than physical performance.
