News Story
Tidal City by Ashley McAvoy and Tracy Harris
Set in a near-future Cardiff haunted by its forgotten past, Tidal City is an immersive performance blending spoken word, live music, and audiovisual projection. It explores how the city’s rapid expansion, civic amnesia, and relentless pursuit of progress have made it one of the most flood-prone urban areas in Britain, literally and figuratively built on unstable ground.
The piece imagines Cardiff on the edge of rising tides. Still building, still forgetting, still pushing forward without looking back.
Through different voices, the performance asks: What happens to a city that forgets where it came from? Who gets remembered when the waters rise?
This is not alarmism but a reckoning. Cardiff’s population has grown from 1,800 in 1801 to over 370,000 today, often at the expense of memory, heritage, and foresight. Beneath the castle’s ancient foundations lie traces of lagoons, glaciers, and floods that have shaped the land for millennia. Now, with sea levels rising, one in seven Welsh properties face flood risk; in Cardiff alone, 33,000 homes may be impacted by 2050.
Tidal City offers a space to confront this precarious future—through memory, myth, and the voice of the land itself.
The Artists
"What's the Wifi Passowrd?" by Rachel Greer
“What’s the WiFi Password?” is a solo dance piece exploring connection, loneliness, and the awkwardness of modern life through humour, physical theatre, and movement.
The work reflects the social “lags” we experience when trying to connect in a fractured, performative world.
The piece asks: what does connection actually look like today, and why is it so hard?It explores the effort of trying to be seen and understood, especially in online or isolated spaces, without offering easy answers. Instead naming the gaps, glitches, and persistent attempts to reach out.
Surreal, funny, and recognisable, the piece invites audiences to laugh with,the performer, reflecting the strange, human reality of wanting connection but not always knowing how to ask for it.
