In The Dark on tour

In The Dark means precisely that: you are literally in the dark as new sound experience Hush hits the road with dates including November 12 in Chichester Cathedral; November 14 at All Saints, Hove; and December 17 in Guildford Cathedral.

The show is performed entirely in darkness, inviting audiences to leave behind the visual noise of the outside world and experience music with every sense heightened. The promise is a one-of-a-kind journey into sound, a 70-minute show performed in darkness, with a company of 30 live musicians and vocalists moving silently through the venue, entirely unamplified, surrounding a seated audience who wear eye masks throughout.

There is no stage. There is no lighting of any kind.

With sight removed entirely, the senses recalibrate, and the audience's attention shifts wholly to the sound – a heightened, visceral, ever-changing 360 sound wall of live music that moves, swells and recedes around every seat in the room, explains Andrea Cockerton who founded In The Dark in Cambridge in 2017.

Since then, it has grown from its original sold-out shows into a full London season in 2024, performed by professional musicians drawn from the West End, the Royal College of Music, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and other leading institutions.

In The Dark has now offered more than 60 performances to more than 8,000 people. The invitation is to slow down and switch off the outside world, with arrangements of songs by Sigur Rós, Coldplay, Ólafur Arnalds, Mumford & Sons and more.

As Andrea explains, the initial concept was an experiment to find out what it was like to listen to music in the dark. Part of the inspiration was the London restaurant where you eat in the dark, a place where the food apparently tastes different: “We wanted to see if you would experience music differently in the dark. So we tried it and things just snowballed from there so quickly. We got great feedback, and the tickets kept selling out. I always knew that I wanted to bring a group of pro musicians together. This was in 2017 when I first came up with it. Covid obviously stopped it for about four years. But now it has really taken off. As soon as I could, I got together a group of pro musicians.”

For the performances the audience is seated and, as Andrea says, obviously cathedrals have windows so they are not sitting in absolute pitch darkness – but they are invited to wear sleep masks during the performance.

“The musicians then move around the audience and a cellist walk just in front of you while a vocalist is behind you. We've got 30 performers, and they are all in choreographed positions. The sound is not coming from a stage. It is not coming from just one position. They're moving all the time. It's all choreographed in the darkness and it is all a little bit otherworldly.

“We have got two shows. The one we have been running in London for two years is called Hush and that's the one that will be coming to you. We're bringing in a new show in London called Pulse. Hush is a mixture of ambient scandi folk and a little bit of Nordic with lots of big and small. Hush is a really good way to describe it. There are moments of stillness in the show. It's all very accessible and it's all very much indie.”