Dark Things, a collaborative performance project by Performance Studies Collective, is directed by Anuradha Kapur and Deepan Sivaraman and brings the ‘labouring body’ to the centre of the digitized-mechanized 21st-century world. It scrapes out fragments from the lives of construction and factory workers, manual scavengers, bone collectors, migrants and the displaced. The fringes crawl into the performance space, creating a polyphony of voices.

Multiple sensory elements — words, light, sound, music, objects, bodies, graphics — overlap, overriding our familiar experience of watching a cohesive narrative. The pluri-medial work is gradually set up like an installation in an ambiguous space in a way that all the elements talk to each other through resonances and contradictions. A rugged open ground could morph into a toxic construction site, an abandoned dockyard or a haunting burial ground.

The performance also uses words as texts by Ari Sitas as one of the pegs that appear onscreen or are spoken in fragments. It opens with migrant bodies trudging into the space like shadows, carrying huge weights on their backs: objects, memories, the inconsequential things we hold on to as roots when forced to leave home. A persistent sound of mobility — an automobile, a train, a van — juxtaposed with Afro-Asian indigenous music heightens the pain of being displaced by the draconian capitalist machinery. The role of the camera as interpreter is inescapable in the digital showing of such a spatially engaged live performance.