BETWEEN > 1 is a contemporary dance-theatre work directed by Zoe Zhao and James Shing Mu Cheng. Set over the course of one night, the piece follows Nerve’s inner turmoil as she spends a night with her partner, Organ, which triggers traumatic memories of her childhood. I asked the team to tell us a bit more about this piece.
“In a family where love was only ever exchanged for obedience, Nerve made compliance her survival instinct and “not being abandoned” her only definition of love. Now, in an intimate relationship that echoes everything she tried to escape, her body recognises the danger before her mind does – control disguised as care, discipline disguised as protection, consumption disguised as devotion.
BETWEEN >1 is a contemporary dance-theatre work that enters the interior world of one woman’s deepest fears and desires. Through the collision of three figures: a lover, a father, and the self caught between them – the piece lays bare the paradox of love: the way we run towards the very thing that wounds us, and the unbearable difficulty of learning to stop.”
Where: The Courtyard Theatre
When: 7-8 Aug
Ticket link: https://camdenfringe.com/events/between-1/
What’s your show about, and where did the idea come from?
BETWEEN > 1 is a contemporary dance-theatre work that explores love, abandonment, and the ways the body remembers what the conscious mind seeks to escape. The work centres on Nerve, a woman who grew up in a family where love was conditional, something that had to be earned through exchange. From an early age, she learned to exchange silence, obedience, and endurance for a sense of safety. As an adult, when intimate relationships become entangled with care, control, fear, and the threat of abandonment, her body recognises the familiar danger long before her conscious mind does.
The work is inspired by our interest in embodied memory, the understanding that the body often responds before experience can be articulated in language. Other than asking how trauma can be narrated as a coherent story, BETWEEN > 1 investigates how it returns through breath, touch, repetition, hesitation, and the body’s involuntary responses.
At its core, the work asks a question: How can one relearn the meaning of love when “not being abandoned” has been mistaken for “being loved” in the first place? Through movement, theatricality, and embodied presence, BETWEEN > 1 traces the fragile process of unlearning survival and reimagining intimacy beyond fear.
Sell it to the potential audience in one sentence.
Come and witness three women on stage embody the inner world of one woman. A body caught between love and abandonment, searching for a way through what it cannot forget.
Why did you want to be part of the Camden Fringe?
Camden Fringe represents an important next stage in the development of BETWEEN > 1. The first iteration of the work was developed within the context of an art school, where both the work and its audience shared a common institutional and artistic frame of reference.
Audiences were often familiar with the project’s origins, as well as the artistic and research questions that informed its development. As a result, the context in which the work was presented inevitably shaped how it was interpreted and experienced.
Presenting the work at Camden Fringe offers a fundamentally different context. It allows BETWEEN > 1 to move beyond the environment in which it was created and engage with audiences who have no prior knowledge of the project or its creative process.
For us, this shift is essential. A performance only begins to demonstrate its communicative potential when it can generate meaning independently of the context that produced it. We are interested in understanding how the work functions when encountered on its own terms. Without contextual explanations or prior familiarity, what can audiences perceive through the choreography, the performers’ bodies, and the theatrical space?
How are the work’s themes of embodied memory, attachment, and abandonment experienced through performance itself? Camden Fringe provides an opportunity to investigate these questions while exposing the work to a broader public. We see it not only as a platform for presentation but also as a critical stage in the ongoing development of BETWEEN > 1, enabling us to evaluate its capacity to communicate across different audiences and performance contexts.
What’s your favourite memory of Fringe theatre?
For us, it is less a single memory and more a feeling we associate with Fringe theatre. We value the close proximity between performers and audiences that Fringe spaces make possible. These performances do not rely on large stages or elaborate production values.
Instead, the intimacy of the space allows small details to become profoundly expressive; a pause, a breath, or the slightest shift in movement can be felt immediately by the audience. This kind of theatrical encounter is central to our own artistic practice. It allows performance to remain raw, intimate, and open to uncertainty, rather than presenting itself as a polished, finished product.
In these spaces, audiences are not positioned as distant observers; they share the same environment as the performers and experience the work as something unfolding in time. We are drawn to this immediacy and to the unique relationship that Fringe theatre creates between performer and audience; one in which neither can remain entirely detached from the encounter.
What’s next for you/the show?
After Camden Fringe, we hope to keep developing BETWEEN > 1 and bring it into different spaces, with different kinds of audiences. The work has undergone significant development since its first iteration. One of the most important changes has been the introduction of three female performers. Rather than presenting a conflict between a single protagonist and external figures, the performance now explores the tensions within a single embodied self, where different voices, memories, and fears coexist and collide.
This shift has expanded our choreographic and dramaturgical approach, allowing us to investigate embodied memory through relationships between bodies, the organisation of space, and patterns of repetition and emotional recurrence. For us, Camden Fringe is not an ending but an important stage in its ongoing development. It marks the work’s transition from an art school context into a broader public setting, where it can be tested through new audiences and modes of engagement. We hope to continue developing BETWEEN > 1 beyond Camden Fringe, and to present it in theatres, interdisciplinary arts venues, and international performance contexts, allowing the work to evolve through each new encounter.