great trauma:Weight, Climate, and Tension of Political Perception
Perhaps you know this feeling: You can tell something is wrong, long before you have the words for it.Your breath tightens for no obvious reason. Light feels too sharp, ordinary sounds suddenly cut too deep. You stand in a familiar room and, without knowing why, your balance is off. Inside the body, the signal is clear.
But the moment it enters language, it is renamed a misunderstanding, oversensitivity, being emotional.Around you, people, structures, institutions all say in different ways: Nothing’s wrong. You’re overreacting. You’ll be fine.That gap is where Great Trauma begins the gap between what the body and consciousness already know, and what rationality, habit and institutions are willing to recognise.
In this project I treat theatre as a laboratory of perception, not a machine for explaining the world. The central question is not how to tell a story about trauma, or how to represent a single incident. Instead, the work asks: How is trauma lived as a long-term field of tension something continuous, hard to name, but constantly present in bodies, materials and environments? Everything that follows，the stones, the weight, the climate, the fleeting light and dust， works inside that perceptual gap, not to close it, but to make it tangible enough that it can no longer be quietly ignored.
great trauma, 2025 Platform Theatre, London
Body–Matter: Letting understanding begin with weight
What makes a body move，muscle, emotion, breath?
In Great Trauma, the answer begins with weight.
Eight collaborators from materials, scenography and environmental design started not with ready-made props, but with powder, fragments and compacted masses, slowly creating the stones for the piece. These stones are not soft, symbolic objects. They sit close to the weight of real rock，heavy enough to make the body genuinely bend, shorten its stride, re-arrange its breathing， yet tuned through repeated tests so they do not simply break a performer.
For two months of rehearsals, six performers simply carried and stacked the stones, losing balance with them, falling with them, and building them back up again. When the body began to tremble, when a knee made a tiny adjustment to protect a joint, when a shoulder tried to hide its exhaustion，these moments were not treated as mistakes to be cleaned up, but as the real material of the work.
On stage, the audience is not asked to decode a metaphor about pressure. They encounter bodies negotiating with weight deciding how slowly to walk, how to get down a step, at what point breath falls out of rhythm, when there is nothing to do but stop. Often the audience’s own bodies respond first，shoulders tightening, legs tensing in sympathy, breath caught without noticing.
Understanding grows from there，“I get it” is no longer a purely rational conclusion.The body has already made a decision inside the weight of the stone, and only afterwards does the mind begin to name trauma, pressure, survival.
Environment–Climate: The environment as an apparatus for consciousness
Once flesh and stone are entangled, attention turns outward – towards environment and climate.
Bringing weather indoors is an absurdly ambitious idea, but in Great Trauma it became the next step. In the theatre, light, temperature, air movement, haze, reflection and melting materials are not background decoration. They are ways of giving a temporary outline to something that is usually invisible: tension.
Beams of light move slowly through haze, reflections slide over stone and skin, ice melts and quietly changes the path of the light. The density of the air feels slightly different from moment to moment. None of this is a “big effect”. It sits more like a low, continuous hum – a suspended state, a kind of ECG of the room, drawing the fluctuations of pressure in space.
This environmental dramaturgy becomes, for me, a mechanism for consciousness to appear.Consciousness is no longer imagined as something hidden inside the actor’s head. It shows itself in the circulation of climate, light and matter – as a field that everyone in the room can feel.
That field is also where I start to think about climatic empathy.Where does the wind enter? Which side of the room becomes too bright to look at comfortably?At what moment does the haze suddenly thicken, and which area quietly becomes a place you do not want to linger?
In this situation spectators are not passive, and performers are no longer worried about whether they are “expressive enough”. We share the same air, the same shaft of light, the same field of tension. Empathy shifts from “I understand your story” to: My body and your body are being shaped, at the same time, by the same pressure and weather.
Ephemeral Tension: How fleeting things draw the outline of violence
Wind has no shape, but rain driven sideways cuts lines across it. Water has no memory, yet ripples record a passing gust.
Clouds, shadows of trees, small patches of light on a wall create the strange feeling that nothing is really happening – and yet you cannot stop looking.
These ephemeral phenomena are not decorative touches. In Great Trauma they become a way of making systemic violence visible.
Systemic violence and structural neglect rarely present themselves as single, dramatic events. More often they appear as a long-term arrangement: certain people are kept at the edge, treated as replaceable labour, temporary guests, blurred presences.
Their bodies live for years inside a field of tension, but it is hard to point to one exact moment and say:“It was that sentence, that incident, that cut.”
On stage, I try to manufacture small “outlines” of this condition.States that exist most of the time as anxiety, sleeplessness or diffuse unease are briefly traced as a line, a shadow, a pocket of tight air. Light that suddenly fractures, a strip of dust on the floor marking the path of a movement, a patch of space where the air feels heavier than it should – these images do not last long. They disappear quickly, but before they go, they ask the audience’s bodies to register the tension. The point is not to fix violence into a single clear picture, but to let its pressure be sensed as something that passes through, leaves a mark, and refuses to stay still.