UPON entering the theatre, we almost walked right into Eliza Sanders, who was already on stage, stretching, and clad only in underpants. Her appearance is androgynous, save for her bare breasts, yet the focus was quickly on her strong, muscular legs, her broad, defined back and arms and her ribs.

Her movements often appeared to be exploratory, testing out various contortions, as if she had just been given the vehicle of a body to figure out, like a being just landed on Earth, or like a newborn animal trying to work out the best way to stand up.

“Castles” is a follow on from another of her works, “Pedal Peddle”, which is similarly themed. This cross-genre performance, directed by Charles Sanders, incorporated elements of cabaret and blends impressive dance and movement, with physical theatre. Eliza has a background in ballet and contemporary theatre and is equally as commanding an actress as she is dancer.

Eliza explored a stream of conscious and subconscious connections, apparently random, but in fact making more sense than might be comfortable to admit. Grabbing onto a sound, a word or a phrase, she let it evolve into the next. Sometimes this segued into recognisable song lyrics, which Eliza then sang. “Gay men love Kate. Bush…It doesn’t hurt me, do you wanna know how it feels?”

This was interspersed with dance segments. At one point, Eliza sings whilst in a headstand, in another, she attached herself to a patchwork figure, manipulated by her own body, before pulling lines of scarves from it and stringing them up around her.

The dramatic physicality was awkward and somewhat tortured, yet resisted self-indulgent experimentation. The strength and suppleness of Eliza’s dancing was juxtaposed with the disjointed, fragile sanity represented by the script.

This is not pretty theatre. It is not designed to make the dance, the movement, the monologue appear effortless. It was breathless, gory, slightly disturbing, exhaustive theatre. There was, however, some comfort in knowing that whatever weird manic train of “random” thoughts or connections we may make up, or dream of, we are not alone – if we externalised our own internal monologue, here it is, laid before you!

The performance concluded with Eliza disassembling her colourful patchwork playground and wrapping herself in it, exiting to Regina Spektor’s “Ne me Quitte Pas” (Don’t leave me).

It’s bizarre, it’s Bush, it’s best to see it and judge for yourself.

Castles is on until 8th October, with a double bill performance with “Pedal” on Saturday.