Amusements

"You are an audience," the Sleepwalk Collective tells us. "You are a machine for watching. Remember everything." Trust me: no one will have trouble remembering Amusements.

In a lecture theatre in a former veterinary school, Amusements’ audience members seat themselves, read an instructional pamphlet and put on the headsets provided. The lights go down and the ‘ride’ begins.

It is difficult to describe what follows, and if you are 16 or over and don’t suffer from claustrophobia or panic attacks, it is absolutely worth experiencing. Imagine David Lynch aggressively trying to hypnotise you. Or if Laurie Anderson was 25, Spanish, and had you locked in a shed.

If a theme is to be gathered from Amusements, it may well be manipulation. “None of this is real,” narrator Iara Solano Arana tells us. “But your body doesn’t know that.” And much of the show is indeed about manipulating our bodies – into a fear state. We are told we're about to feel like we're drowning. Arana's voice transitions into a frightening man’s grumble – in line, we hear, with one of her dreams. The subconscious, it seems, is a spooky place.

This monologue covers what is meant to be the breadth of human experience via audio immersion, but it would be absorbed better by its audience if the Spanish Sleepwalk Collective wasn’t trying to scare the bejesus out of us. With 50 per cent fewer demonic voices, Amusements would have succeeded in becoming what it set out to be: an existential theme park attraction; a life-altering, surreal departure from the world outside the lecture theatre.