Darren Johnston, the choreographer, video artist and sound designer behind Ren-Sa, is British. But his imagination has clearly been encamped (so to speak) by the spooky, beautiful witches of the Ring films directed by Hideo Nakata. (Read the history of the films here.) I can totally understand that: I too was blown away by these films at the Edinburgh Festival back in 2000. "These films (I'd recommend parts one and two, but not the prequel, Ring 0) were so scary I was in tears throughout, but maybe that's because they got me missing my girlfriend," I wrote at the time.
But I wasn't scared. Oh no! I was too busy watching the video, which looked like multi-screen CCTV footage of Sadako's asylum, or some kind of fashion goth reality TV show. The highlight of the piece was when two more witches rose suddenly out of the sand and struck hideous postures under a staccato Morse Code strobe light, as the music shrieked and roared and scary children's voices filled the warehouse. We were then bundled back into the blacked-out buses and driven back to town. Actually, the most disturbing thing about Ren-Sa is that there are no toilets out at the warehouse. We all returned to the land of the living with desperately full bladders.