Concept and directed by Nicolas Tian, with music composition by Oscar B. Morgan and choreography by Lewis Walker, in collaboration with rehearsal director Courtney Deyn performers Alex Thirkle and Andrew Lennox Scott, Abyss offers a visceral exploration of desire, mortality, and the liminal spaces between.

This performance draws upon Georges Bataille's description in Erotism: Death and Sensuality as its overview:“How sweet it is to gaze long upon the object of our desire, to live on in our desire, instead of dying by going the whole way, by yielding to the excessive violence of desire! We know that possession of the object we are afire for is out of the question.

It is one thing or another: either desire will consume us entirely, or its object will cease to fire us with longing. We can possess it on one condition only, that gradually the desire it arouses will fade. Better for desire to die than for us to die, though! We can make do with an illusion. If we possess its object we shall seem to achieve our desire without dying. Not only do we renounce death, but also we let our desire, really the desire to die, lay hold of its object and we keep it while we live on. We enrich our life instead of losing it.”