About
“We cannot allow you to go into the heart of that silent dark forest and to the door of that cabin. You will not like what is in the cabin. We know what is in the cabin and it is very, very bad.”
In the sterile glow of a Silicon Valley boardroom, two beguiling strangers meticulously outline the terms and conditions. In the beating heart of a search engine, a shadow falls across your browser tab, whispering that everything will be okay as long as you keep your eyes fixed on the radiant screen. In a barren field lost in time, two teenage girls prise open a portal they'll never be able to close.
Guidelines is a live haunting for the social media age, a primordial ritual conjuring the dark side of growing up online. Summoning the internet as the deep dark woods of our cultural imagination, this is a shapeshifting journey through cached nightmares, a conjuring in the comments section, and a reckoning with all the things you were too young to see or understand.
This is the debut show from CONGLOMERATE.
Quotes & Reviews
Events Programme
All events are free with your ticket to Guidelines.
Panel: Staging Fear In An Age of Constant Horror
Tuesday 10th February, post-show
Guidelines co-creators James Nash and Pip Williams are joined by journalist and writer Hussein Kesvani (Trashfuture, Ten Thousand Posts) and author Alison Rumfitt (Tell Me I’m Worthless, Brainwyrms) in a post-show panel exploring how stories mutate under conditions of endless information, collapsed context and algorithmic determination.
Taking folk horror, internet cultures, and online myth-making as its starting points, the panel asks what it means to make work in the age of digital permacrisis - and what theatre can do that the internet can’t.
The Company
Credits
Writer - Pip Williams
Director - James Nash
Set & Costume Designer - Jida Akil
Sound Designer - Patch Middleton
Lighting Designer - Adi Currie
Movement Director - Ken Nakajima
Producer - Moya Matthews
Dramaturg - Louise Orwin
Facilitator - Alessandra Zavagno
Opening Composition & Vocalist - AJ Turner
Consultant Producer - Ella Dale
Stage Manager - Sam Thornton
Cast
Rachel-Leah Hosker
Alex McCauley
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Company
CONGLOMERATE is an artistic partnership between James Nash and Pip Williams. Separately they have worked with Cambridge Junction, Camden People’s Theatre, Gate Theatre, LOD Musiktheater (Ghent), Vault Festival, Volcano Theatre and Zoo Venues. Together they create multidisciplinary work about big structures, interrogating the modern mythology we inherit from them, and the way we make culture. CONGLOMERATE creates unique multi-disciplinary experiences that expand beyond traditional theatre and performance practices. They aim to make unsettling, thought-provoking experiences that stay with you long after you’ve left the room.