“we would never leave the world like this. that’s why we put you here. you hear us?” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Dub: Finding Ceremony”In their latest production, Gob Squad use their phones to send live voice messages from the urban space into the dark void of the theatre. Cut off from the world beyond, the audience witnesses a 21st century seance. A sparse landscape of invisible spirits manifest news and sonic evidence of truths that seem to have disappeared from our daily lives, despite being all around us. Gob Squad act as mediums who wander between two worlds in order to establish contact and break through to the other side. On their journeys, details such as items discarded by the roadside become just as significant as a change in temperature or atmospheric conditions. Encounters with things, animals and plants provide answers to  questions, passers-by give clues to the unresolved. Gradually the incoming messages condense into a collage of sounds, filling the empty stage and developing a life of their own. Eventually items and spirits emerge from the fog and make the worlds appear more permeable through their appearance. In the flash of the possibility of a real exchange, what feels far away suddenly comes very close to us and becomes a tangible moment of the here and now. “News from Beyond” invites us to overcome barriers of time and space and ‘seeing is believing’. What separates us? And who or what do we want to connect with? Which voices do we dare to follow? And can we exorcise the ghosts of our present to imagine a reconnected future?