Director: Sasha Gefen
Six women stand on an unadorned stage. They vocalise, make noises, find places to initiate intricate percussive accompaniment, and move and dance and enchant. They do it together, improvising, picking up on each other’s contributions, finding harmonies. They make sounds that are magical, the interactive performances are amazing, and to cap it all, they ask their audience to tell stories that they go on to perform. Immersive doesn’t quite describe it; perhaps ‘inclusive’ is a better description. The six vocalists are outrageously competent, but anyone in the audience prepared to tell a story informs the performance just as much. The Pascol performers are just that generous.
Pascol was founded by Sasha Gefen, a musician, composer, and music therapist. She is joined onstage by Vera Raskina, Phoebe Osborne, Namvula Reenie, Claudia Marques, and Dunja Botic. The sympathy these performers evince is astounding – any interesting idea, or rhythm, or harmony, is immediately acknowledged and incorporated, no one treads on an idea or neglects a cue, and the tonal impact is glorious.
There are occasional break-out moments when five vocalists step back and cede the limelight to one of their number with a particularly good idea. Much of the vocalisation is sound rather than semantics, but every once in a while, they stand forward and tell the stories using words. There is some song structure, but mostly it is fragments. The meaning comes through on the supremely suggestive soundscape, carrying a huge emotional weight, generating feeling and sympathy.
The stories offered by the audience are obviously unpredictable and varied, but this show includes childhood memories, fragments of poetry, declarations of love, and anxiety about the fate of family left in Ukraine after gaining refuge in the UK. That’s a fair variety of subjects and moods, and each story receives appropriate treatment. Emotional responses are the order of the day.
The movement that accompanies the singing is often minimal rhythmic amplification, but there are dance sequences, interpretive movements, that add to the atmospheric chanting and provide a visual aspect to an otherwise barebones staging. It is exactly right; a more active physical showing would distract from the mood-building of the entwined voices. There is grace and there is dynamism and there is rhythmic underpinning, but the focus is always on the voices.
The performance lasts for 90 minutes, encompasses five or six stories, uses an open stage and minimal lighting, and plays with the acoustics of the room in which they perform and the sound properties of the walls and floor that they occasionally beat on. It harks back to the sung choruses that gave rise to Greek theatrical practice; it is that fundamental, that simple, that beautiful.
Every performance will be uniquely responsive to the contributions from their audience, but on this showing, every performance will be uniquely valuable. The performance at Theatro Technis is a one-off, but the company appear at various venues, announced on the Pascol website. This performance is part of the Voila! Festival, taking place in a number of London venues throughout November.
Reviewed on 15 November 2025
