Sheol, from the Hebrew, is the name given to the place where souls go after death, a subterranean purgatory of stillness, but one reached by both the good and evil. It’s a curious but intriguing title for this aural art installation.
Inside the large and chilly steel box venue behind the EICC, a woman in orchestral performance attire paces around a floor scattered with gravel and random items: a frayed set of angel wings, an oxygen cylinder and a microphone. During the piece, several musicians intermittently come and go, occasionally playing sections of Henryk Górecki’s 3rd Symphony.
As this is primarily an art piece, it’s difficult, if not fruitless, to try to impose a specific narrative upon the events. But as the audience is informed outside the venue, as the piece begins to the laments of a lone trumpeter standing in Edinburgh’s twilight dusk, this is a show in part evoked by the strict abortion laws in Poland, requiring pregnant women to carry dead foetuses to full term and delivery. With that in mind, some of the starker imagery is clearer, such as when the female lead performer rubs ash into her naked stomach and back, blows vape-smoke into wine glasses and records repeated sounds of surgical instruments dropped wetly into kidney dishes.
On the other hand, this is a very abstract performance, one that leans predominately on the audible foley of the crunching feet, clanking of props, keening voicework and the live instruments played, leaning into Górecki’s aforementioned 3rd, or Symfonia pieśni żałosnych (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) as the artist searches to capture some specific sound, amidst her frantic changing of CDs and manipulation of the various props and cast.
Ultimately, like any art installation, this ought to be considered as such, and is something that will mean different things to different people: some will simply see an obtuse hour of flailing, screaming and crunching feet on gravel; others will be drawn deep into the implied movement and imagery on a raw emotional level. But, taken as theatrical entertainment during the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s a well-executed piece of physical and aural theatre, admittedly dense and undeniably stark and raw at times, which paints a series of disparate images that don’t entirely coalesce into a resonant whole.