A beautifully expressive dialogue between music and movement, PIA carries a tender human story from Barnsley to the stars.
PIA sends a woman from Barnsley towards the stars on a wave of brass, electronic music and dance. Warmth and imagination give this ambitious journey its emotional pull, finding wonder in the hopes and memories of an ordinary life. At its heart is the beautiful dialogue between Hannah Peel’s music and Katya Bourvis’ choreography, each discovering new depths of feeling in the other.
Built around Peel’s Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia, the production follows Pia at three ages, allowing recollection, everyday experience and cosmic adventure to share the stage. Time becomes wonderfully elastic. A life need not unfold neatly to reveal its emotional shape, and Bourvis finds an affecting theatrical vocabulary for the way different versions of ourselves remain present within us.
The relationship between sound and movement gives this idea its vitality. Peel’s expansive musical landscape offers the choreography room to breathe, while the dancers lend its vastness a recognisably human scale. There is a lovely reciprocity here: music suggests a destination, movement discovers the emotional reason for travelling there. Together, they make Pia’s longing feel both immense and intimate.
The live brass ensemble brings particular resonance to this exchange. Brass carries associations of community, industry and collective endeavour, making it an inspired companion to a story rooted in Barnsley. Against the score’s electronic horizons, that familiar musical warmth becomes a connection between home and the unknown. Occasionally, the sheer volume threatens the finer balance, but the presence of live musicians gives the evening a thrilling physical charge.
Sonia Marie Dvorak, Sirena Tocco and Janet Amsden share the central role with generosity and sensitivity. Their contrasting qualities allow Pia’s identity to develop across the three performances, while preserving a sense of continuity. Youthful energy, adult assurance and the older woman’s tenderness become aspects of one personality, held together by curiosity.
Around them, the ensemble supplies humour, companionship and emotional texture. Bourvis’ choreography is especially persuasive in its attention to relationships: the encounters between bodies give substance to a story that might otherwise float away into abstraction. Jackie Shemesh’s lighting extends the imaginative reach, helping the stage accommodate both personal recollection and celestial possibility.
Some transitions leave their precise meaning open, and the production occasionally asks the audience to make considerable narrative leaps. Yet its emotional invitation remains compelling. We recognise the desire to escape, the persistence of memory and the need to imagine beyond the circumstances of a life.
PIA’s achievement lies in making those impulses sing together. Music and choreography sustain an absorbing partnership, each enriching what the other can express. The result is a tender, adventurous piece of dance theatre with its feet in a Yorkshire town and its imagination gloriously elsewhere, reaching towards the stars.