We often forget that not only is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe a huge event filled with shows for people to come and see, but it also functions as a massive three-week exhibition for the arts. Sometimes a show exists not to delight audiences or to get a slot on Broadway, but to demonstrate a new idea or principle.
The Fahrenheit Alliance V is one example of something so different and unusual that you’d struggle to find it elsewhere. It’s an adaptation of sorts of Ray Bradbury’s often misunderstood classic Fahrenheit 451. In the original story, society ceases to value books and active communication, and massive television screens dominate one’s life. This inspired a play by Kyle Yamada called The Fahrenheit Alliance, which further modernised those themes, which has led to this sequence of works that also add the concept of isolation and the global pandemic to the mix.
The Fahrenheit Alliance V is a play with one audience member and one performer. The audience member lies in darkness, on a mattress beneath a blanket. Images are projected all around them, and a soundscape in both English and Japanese plays from various speakers, surrounding the audience member in a blanket of sound and light. The images are a combination of landscape pictures and the artist, who lies on their own mattress and blanket, in a separate chamber.
Halfway through, this changes, and rather than a performer, it is the audience member who is projected. Presumably representing isolation, though it’s all up to your own interpretation, as this is more art than performance. It’s also oddly retro-futuristic, at times feeling like a scene from something like Space 1999 or The Prisoner.
If that sounds weird, well, it is. But it’s also oddly intimate and self-reflective. It’s a bit like entering Yoda’s cave on Dagobah, in the sense that the most important thing you bring to this is yourself. Immersive experiences require real effort to be actually immersive, and The Fahrenheit Alliance V does this very well. Unusual, thought-provoking, and deeply rooted in speculative fiction and future thinking, The Fahrenheit Alliance V is something rare and unique. Experience if you can.
You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about the artist and future performances here.
