Award-winning performance duo Emergency Chorus are bringing their latest show Ways of Knowing to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025. Known for their bold, experimental work, Clara Potter-Sweet and Ben Kulvichit return with a genre-defying piece that blends dance, sound, and text.
The show explores humanity’s obsession with predicting the future, from tarot cards to corporate forecasting, all wrapped in a visually rich and emotionally resonant performance. It’s a timely reflection on uncertainty, imagination, and collective hope.
Ways of Knowing runs from 31 July to 24 August (excluding 11 & 18 August) at Big Belly, Underbelly Cowgate. Tickets are available here.
You’re bringing Ways of Knowing to Big Belly, Underbelly Cowgate – what can you tell us about the show?
Ways of Knowing is a show about the many methods and tools we use to predict and prophesy the future — historical, contemporary, scientific, mystical. The future is inherently mysterious, and so is the show: we think of the show almost like a series of visions or omens, a collage of material that could be images in the tea leaves or guidance from a set of tarot cards. What will you see in it? It features many strange and wonderful things like leeches that sense oncoming storms, hermits living in caves, auctioneering chants, indoor weather, underground economics conferences, choreography where we don’t know what the next move will be…
Ways of Knowing explores the human desire to predict the future – what drew you to this theme?
When we started making the show, we didn’t actually know what it was going to be about. Coming out of a Covid-induced hiatus around 2022, we were feeling quite uncertain about our practice, and when we got back into a studio to make something together, we decided not to put any pressure on ourselves to know what we were doing — not to predict the future, in a way. So we discovered the show and what it was about by making it. We made a show about an uncertain future from a place of uncertainty.
But the future has always actually been the central preoccupation of our work. There’s an oft-quoted sentiment from Mark Fisher (via Fredric Jameson) that ‘it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.’ In these incredibly precarious, turbulent times in which the world is experiencing multiplying crises, we’re interested in why that is, and that’s where our curiosity about forecasting and prophecies came from. What motivates certain forms of future-telling? What kinds of future-telling perpetuate the status quo, and which might cause some form of rupture that allows us to think about and make the future differently? How can we imagine beyond what we already know, and how might theatre help us to do this?
The show blends dance, live sound design, and found text. How did you develop this unique theatrical language?
We’re not sure — it’s just how we naturally took to making performances. We think of it as collaging. We tend to start from a lot of research: we read books, trawl the internet, watch films, go on trips (a big part of Ways of Knowing was inspired by a caving excursion). The research branches out in different directions. It’s a great way of creating a shared language, of figuring out what’s interesting to us. We use this research as prompts to make material, or maybe it will inspire scores for movement, or sometimes we just ‘sample’ text that we find fascinating, finding ways to present it that recontextualise it.
We then take these fragments of material and layer, develop and structure them so that they form a kind of tapestry. We like that our work creates meaning out of the juxtaposition of quite different things — it asks an audience to join the dots, and everyone joins them differently. After we made our first show, we learnt that our process was very similar to that of the Chicago-based performance collective Goat Island. Since then, their work has been a constant inspiration to us, and we even got the opportunity to work with ex-Goat Island member Karen Christopher as an outside eye on this show — a full circle moment.
You’ve described the show as “curious and slippery.” How do you want audiences to feel as they experience it?
Like they have more questions than answers. Like they might have new warmth or willingness towards not-knowing — a curiosity about the experience of being in the dark, literally. Surprised, tickled, confused, scared, satisfied.
Winning the Untapped Award is a big deal – how has that support shaped your journey to the Fringe this year?
It’s a real privilege. The simple truth is that we simply wouldn’t be able to afford to do the Fringe without it, so we’re just trying to make the most of the opportunity. The backing of three supportive, experienced partners takes some of the pressure off of certain aspects of the Fringe, which means that we’ll (hopefully!) be able to spend less time day-to-day worrying about how to get bums on seats, and more time thinking about the important things we wouldn’t otherwise get to pay proper attention to — investing in access support and looking after ourselves, using the Fringe as an opportunity to connect with new people and build a future life for the show, creating a published text which also includes our previous works, designing merch, testing out new creative ways of collecting audience feedback. We’ve been able to scheme in ways we haven’t before.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Ways of Knowing?
You’re onto something, there.
