Composer Damien Ricketson and Director Carlos Gomes’ new collaboration with the ever-inventive Ensemble Offspring has a suitably enigmatic title. The Secret Noise is an eccentric, but sensitively constructed evening that is part installation, part dance theatre and part concert. It’s a complex gambit: balancing these three potentially overbearing elements could easily be misjudged. However Gomes and Ricketson have succeeded in negotiating the potential pitfalls inherent in immersive performance to create an insightful and highly visceral evening.

Ricketson has set out to explore various ideas of secret music: music that is shielded or hidden from public consumption. This might seem like an unpromising subject matter, but the result is something far more poetic and accessible than one might expect.

In advance of the performance it is requested that the audience bring a simple prop: an abstract drawing that we are asked to customise in some way. The relevance of which is yet to be revealed, but this opportunity for the audience to engage creatively with the show sets the tone for the kind of interactive event The Secret Noise delivers.

The large room benearh Sydney Town Hall provides the perfect blank canvas for this innovative production. Upon entering the space there are five...