Recirquel To Return To Edinburgh Fringe Festival With Immersive Piece IMA

Multi-award-winning, internationally renowned Hungarian cirque danse company Recirquel will bring their latest creation IMA to the Edinburgh Festival 2023. Having delighted Edinburgh Festival critics and audiences alike in 2017 with 'Paris de Nuit' and in 2018 with 'My Land', IMA (the Hungarian word for "pray") is a highly immersive circus experience, created for the purpose of initiating a meditative, visceral, and spiritual response from its audience.

Performed in a site-specific, purpose-built installation space reminiscent of sacred places, this highly immersive work invites audiences to participate in a unique ritual guided by the performer, who becomes a 21st-century shaman taking the audience into the unknown territories of the human mind.

"IMA is likely a paradigm shift in terms of stage technology, and certainly in terms of the audience experience. Truly immersive; the viewer genuinely dissolves into the theatre space ... a deeply visceral experience.... Although performed by one single artist - this is not a one-person piece, because the space changes with him, expands, narrows, moves, and we, the audience move with it. Even the atheist is forced to associate with something, a power greater than man, that causes almost physical pain to see how many hundreds of thousands and millions of people live their lives without ever seeing anything like this. Nothing similar". 24.hu (Hungarian news site)

Each of the daily shows are performed by a different artist, each performing the same intricately choreographed work, but each bringing their own style and sense of self to the piece, resulting in quite different performances depending on who your artist might be.

Once inside the venue, the seating, lighting, sound, set and rig work in harmony to make every single member of the 97-strong audience feel alone in the theatre and entwined with the performance. Just you and the artist.

Globally acclaimed director-choreographer Bence Vági, renowned for pioneering ground-breaking forms of circus and physical theatre worked with his team to create a magical installation inspired by the starry sky stretching over the desert; the place where human beings realise that we are merely tiny points in the infinite vastness of the universe.

Everyone is probably familiar with this form of loneliness, which is both terrifying and comforting, under the weight of which we can crumble; the sense that out of 8 billion people, we remain alone in the entire universe ....Inside the space, the borders are blurred by the creators; whilst the artist tenses all his muscles to achieve the effect that his body is floating weightlessly in space, we also travel with him. It is impossible to leave the tent without catharsis. Bence Vági's direction is like an iron that smooths out the nerves that have been convulsed by everyday life. INDEX (Hungarian news site)

"An immersive theatre experience, rooted in the modern yearning for miracles which takes us away from the physical reality of earthly existence. The installation evokes the depth of the universe ...in the pulsating space brought to life by the light emanating from millions of points. The soul, leaving the ego behind, sets off on its own path". Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian National paper)

IMA (Pray) will be performed at 12pm*, 1.30pm*, 3pm*, 4.30pm, 6pm and 7.30pm (*Fri, Sat Sun only) in Assembly's specially built venue Murrayfield Ice Rink from 4th - 27th August (not 15th or 22nd)

Booking Link: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/ima

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