Paradise Now (Redux) will be presented in Sydney on 31 May 2026 at City of Sydney Creative Studios, blending poetry, dance and immersive performance.
On Bathurst Street, the late autumn light tends to arrive in fragments. It slips between sandstone facades, catches on glass, then disappears into the steady movement of the city’s late afternoon rhythm. By evening, the street narrows into something quieter, almost internal – a corridor where footsteps begin to sound more deliberate, more considered.
Inside the City of Sydney Creative Studios, that stillness will deepen further.
On 31 May 2026, Paradise Now (Redux) will unfold there as a 65-minute experimental performance shaped by voice, movement, music and projected image. Limited in audience and tightly framed in duration, it will be less an event in the conventional sense than a concentrated work of atmosphere – a piece that will ask to be entered, rather than simply watched.
Paradise Now (Redux) And The Language Of The Earth
The city outside will continue its familiar cadence, but inside the studio space, Paradise Now (Redux) will move through a different kind of time.
Created by Geoffrey Sykes, with Claudia Haines-Cappeau contributing choreography and composition, the work will be presented as a revised iteration of earlier performances staged in Sydney, the Illawarra and internationally across Romania and Bulgaria. Its 2026 form will be substantially reworked – not a revival, but a reconsideration.
At its centre, Paradise Now (Redux) will draw from a layered body of world poetry, spanning up to fifteen sources, both ancient and modern. Rather than treating these texts as separate references, the performance will weave them into a single evolving structure – a shifting field of language, gesture and sound.
The intention, as described in its framing, will be to search for a “language for the earth.” That phrase will feel less like slogan and more like an invitation to listen differently – to words, to bodies, and to the spaces between them.
Paradise Now (Redux) And The Arc Of Becoming
The structure of Paradise Now (Redux) will trace an abstract narrative of human emergence.
It will begin in a place of pre-verbal struggle – not chaos, but something older and less defined – before moving through stages of awareness, self-recognition and contemporary consciousness. The progression will not be linear in a strict sense, but it will suggest an unfolding: a gradual arrival into perspective.
Across its 50-minute runtime, a single performer will carry the work forward. Their presence will shift between spoken word, song, movement and stillness, often dissolving boundaries between these forms rather than reinforcing them.
Projected imagery will appear and recede like memory. Music will not underline meaning so much as surround it. Dance will enter the space not as spectacle, but as interruption – brief articulations of emotion or thought made visible through the body.
In this way, Paradise Now (Redux) will resist hierarchy between its elements. Voice will not dominate image. Movement will not overshadow text. Instead, it will operate through what might be described as a synaesthetic field – where sensation and meaning blur, and understanding is allowed to form slowly.
Paradise Now (Redux) And Immersive Performance In Sydney
The City of Sydney Creative Studios will provide an appropriately intimate setting for the work.
Located on Bathurst Street in the heart of the CBD, the space will hold only a limited audience. Doors will open briefly before the performance begins, and late arrival will not be possible once the work starts. That restriction will shape the experience from the outset – encouraging attention, precision and presence.
Inside, the studio will likely feel stripped back. Lighting will be controlled rather than decorative. Sound will move carefully through the room, creating shifts in density rather than volume. The audience will sit close enough to notice breath, pause and the smallest change in tone.
This proximity will matter.
In Paradise Now (Redux), distance will be reduced not only physically but conceptually. The performance will not present itself as something observed from afar, but as something encountered within shared space. The audience will occupy the same conditions of attention as the performer, held within the same unfolding time.
Paradise Now (Redux) And Earlier Lives Of The Work
Although the 2026 version will be newly structured, Paradise Now (Redux) will carry traces of earlier iterations.
Previous presentations in Sydney and the Illawarra, along with international stagings in Bucharest, Sofia and Bacau, will sit quietly beneath the surface of the work – not as nostalgia, but as accumulated experience.
Those earlier versions explored similar ideas: the relationship between human development and poetic expression, the possibility of performance as a shared act of reflection, and the tension between individual voice and collective memory.
In this revised form, those themes will be re-examined rather than repeated. The work will not attempt to preserve its past but to continue its thinking.
Paradise Now (Redux) And A Contemporary Sense Of Wonder
What will distinguish Paradise Now (Redux) in its Sydney presentation is not scale, but intent.
It will position itself deliberately against spectacle, favouring instead a quieter kind of attention. In a cultural landscape often shaped by speed and saturation, the work will move in the opposite direction – towards slowness, concentration and fragmentation.
There will be moments when image, sound and movement align, creating brief clarity. There will also be moments when they drift apart entirely, leaving gaps that the audience will need to bridge themselves.
This openness will be central to the experience. Meaning will not be delivered, but assembled.
By the time the final sequence arrives, the work will likely feel less like a narrative and more like a trace – something experienced rather than fully explained.
Event Details
Event: Paradise Now (Redux)
Date: Sunday 31 May 2026
Time: 7:30pm–8:45pm (doors open 7:25pm, strict lockout 7:45pm)
Duration: 65 minutes
Location: City of Sydney Creative Studios (COSCS), 119 Bathurst Street, Sydney NSW 2000
Tickets: Limited audience (booking essential)
Official Info: http://www.playscript.net.au