BETWEEN: Crossing Thresholds of Imagination with Art, Poetry, and Hypnosis With Rima Staines and Danny Nemu

An experimental pathway into altered states. 

The evening will be part talk and presentation on hypnosis, altered brain states, art and the imagination, and part creative performance of BETWEEN, with a Q&A.

Artist-magician Rima Staines and trance technician Danny Nemu create a ritual space where journeyers gaze into artwork-portals while listening to hypnotic inductions set to metre and rhyme. Each pairing of word, music and image evokes a different zone of the imaginal, which is both collective and personal, strange and familiar.

Wherever you travel in folklore, you find an Otherworld - a land adjacent to this one where the inhabitants, the rules and the possibilities are a little different. We call it many things: the Unconscious or the Imaginal, Arcadia or Aruanda, Anima Mundi or the Dreaming. It is as varied as the cultures that have journeyed through it, but we all recognise its distinctive character, numinous and yet bewildering. 

Some cross the threshold, pixie-led or following the yellow brick road, curious, questing or foolhardy. However we get there, it is the source of creativity and home to the uncanny, where magic flutes and hens that lay golden eggs await those with the guile to challenge the guardians. 

We instinctively seek it out, via psychedelic, initiatory, creative or ecstatic experience. And the Otherworld speaks to us in turn - and sometimes out of turn - in its own languages of dream, intuition and imagination. 

The artwork is both mirror and gateway... 

The audience gaze into the images while rhythmic language and sound draw them inward. The series of experiences unfolds through stages inspired by different thresholds, each marked by changes in emotional texture, metre, hypnotic technique. The work functions as immersive ritual, poetic theatre, and exploration of the mechanisms of imagination. 

Impact 

The experience bridges art and trance, inviting stillness, exploration and contact with something larger than the self. Audiences leave with a hypnotic recording to access creative or restorative states, and a renewed sense of curiosity about the potentials of our imagination. 

Artists

Danny Nemu is a writer, hypnotist and consciousness researcher whose work explores suggestion, altered states and the power of words on experience. He is the author of Science Revealed and Neuro-Apocalypse. 

tranceformhypno.com / @dannynemu 

Rima Staines is a painter, maker and storyteller working in the liminal realm where myth, dream and image intersect. Her work explores the imaginal as a living world that speaks through symbol and rhythm. 

rimastaines.com / @tilsamka 

Click to watch the taster

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