Director: Yu Ai
Camden Fringe is a broad and vibrant church, with something to tickle all performance taste buds. Representing the conceptual and avant-garde, The Bride melds contemporary dance, song and theatre with a four-strong female tale of questing self-discovery. After her mother dies, Er’er returns to Silkworm Island, the ancestral home on Hòn Tàm Island in the bay of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she confronts her heritage, lays ghosts to rest and seeks a way forward.
Memory, grief and the conflicting desires to return to the familiar and escape its oppressive forces are smoothly, sympathetically expressed by Yu Ai, Lei Ieok Mang, Shiting Tao and Ziyao Geng. This hour-long, cohesive piece is divided into a story arc using projections by Lijuan Kang that evoke the subconscious, primal, or spiritual. Sounds bury deep into the narrative: a metronome measures time, a storm brews, and waves crash in an evocative composition by Thomas Calcutt and Yu-Hui Zong, with bold lighting choices by Yiling Lu.
At the centre of the story is the bride, a spectral sight, submerged in billowing, translucent fabric and train. Will she move toward and live the life expected of her? Costume design by Ziyao Geng and Lu Wang is kinetically and conceptually realised with red umbilical cords that connect mother and daughter, bridal plumes that threaten to blot out the individual beneath and later, as the mood shifts from sombre and reflective to wild and free-spirited, a whirlwind of wildly swinging cloth ribbons resembles a crazy kabuki carwash.
Where The Bride is less effective is in the use of words or commentary in a robotic, disassociated voice. While the voice itself is performed like a form of concrete poetry and evokes an out-of-body experience or PTSD, it functions as exposition and seems superfluous when the narrative is effectively expressed through the elements of movement, lighting, performance and song. As a piece of experimental theatre combining ancient and modern forms, this hypnotic, sensory multi-media performance could easily be imagined in a larger, specialist dance space.
Reviewed on 24 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
