Erin Harrington reviews Running Into the Sun, presented by a2 Company, written and directed by Ben Ashby, choreographed by Nadiyah Akbar, designed by Asha Barr, composed by Lennox Grootjans and Toby Leman, at the Cloisters Studio at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, Tuesday 9 September 2025.
The story of the terrific multidisplinary work Running Into the Sun, written by Ben Ashby and developed with the a2 Company ensemble, is simple and familiar. Ash (Ashby) and Mary (Jasmine Susic), and Ash’s best friend Morris (Ethan Morse), are in that post-uni limbo space, trying to figure out what comes next for their lives. Amid some preidictable life events – a house party to celebrate graduation, a devastating crush, unemployment, analysis paralysis – there are some shocks. An unplanned pregnancy heralds an abrupt shunt into adult responsibility. A very bad flash flood back home in New Zealand demands an immediate response. The latter problem is the first gesture towards the work’s bigger questions, namely what it means to try to live your already confusing small human life within a global omnicrisis marked by anthropogenic climate disaster, live-streamed genocide, geopolitical volatility and necrocapitalism.
Bleak stuff, but Running Into the Sun is an earnest and funny account of how and where young adults might look for hope. It’s a powerfully layered and cohesive work, presented by nine performers and an on-stage operator, combining acting and script, physical theatre, contemporary dance, song, projected film, and even a bit of clowning for good measure. Asha Barr’s production and AV design is impressive, and energy levels are through the roof. An excellent jazz trio (Toby Leman, Lennox Grootjans, and Seth Boy) offers a noisy, insistent soundtrack that expresses a sometimes manic sense of excitement and anxiety, a sense of fuuuuu-. This works in conversation with Nadiyah Akbr’s heavy-footed, twisting choreography and the sense of vitality of the dancers (Akbar, Susic, Alec Katsourakis, Luke Romeo). Bodies and music express what words can’t. The performers are also overlaid with filmed projected scenes that play across the performers’ white costumes. These sequences shift around and offer context to or a sideways commentary on the action, and are sometimes very funny, as in a slo-mo half-naked food fight that accompanies the house party.
The performers bounce off one another, move through each other’s scenes. They find lightness and opportunity within encounters and transitions, and comedy in small, theatrically inventive moments that bring us in and out of the everyday. There are many surprises. It’s a deeply effective, and affecting, way of theatrically expressing a suffocating flood of overwhelm – the exhaustion of feeling angry, confused, and optimistic all at once. My companion sees a bit of The Front Lawn and the Talking Heads in the production’s freewheeling humour and sometimes messy nature, with a dash of Gen Z Blerta. I become really interested in the work’s encounters with time – the slow time of the earth, the human process of growing older, the manufactured urgeny of social media and the real urgency of crisis, alongside the immediate matters of the everyday. It’s all amplified in the musicians’ stuttering, shifting time signatures and changes in instrumentation, and the dancers’ stomps, leaps and sweeps. It’s easy to see why this won the prestigious Best Theatre award at the 2024 Melbourne Fringe.
It’s really exciting to see a collaborative work with such a clear sense of theatrical purpose performed in Ōtautahi. It takes enromous skill to wrangle so much into a fluid presentation. Bar a few volume issues it’s also really well suited to the intimate Cloisters studio space at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora. As it approaches its emotional and heartfelt climax, the production lands on two mantras: it’s better to do something than nothing. Existing is better than not existing. The show challenges the audience to find reasons to hope, and from there, the rest is up to you.
Running Into the Sun plays at the Cloisters Studio until Sunday 14 September, then plays in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.
Flat City Field Notes 