Dreamscape at Omnibus Theatre is a powerful and inventive hip-hop theatre piece presented by Andy Jordan Productions and Hindsight Productions, blending beatboxing, spoken word and dance to reimagine the real life of Tyisha Miller who is a 19-year-old Black woman killed by police in California, and the dreams that were cut short on that tragic night. This award-winning show, having earned acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe and four awards at the Los Angeles NAACP Awards, arrives in London with a striking fusion of style and substance that invites audiences to witness, confront and reflect on race, violence and lived experience.
The evening opens with a rhythmic pulse that feels almost like a heartbeat: performers step into a shifting wash of light, beatboxing looping into spoken word that threads through the space like a conversation. Before a line is even spoken, the physical energy onstage with dancers’ feet tapping, hands slicing the air, bodies leaning into each beat, pulls you into the worlds the piece creates. That opening kinetic moment sets the tone: this isn’t conventional theatre, but something lived and lived-in.
What Dreamscape does especially well is balance lyrical tenderness with unflinching reality. Early in the show, we’re invited into imagined memories of Tyisha’s life, moments of laughter, swagger, casual joy sketched in hip-hop movement and spoken fragments with humour and warmth. These scenes feel intimate and immediate, grounded in small details like a shared grin or a breath held before a punchline.
The contrast comes sharply when the coroner’s voice enters: cold, clinical recitation of the twelve bullet wounds from the autopsy report. The tone is starkly different, and it lands because the earlier scenes have let us feel who Tyisha was. It’s a bold directorial choice to let these two energies, playful memory and brutal factuality, slap up against each other without smoothing the edges, demanding the audience meet both at full force.
At its best, Dreamscape feels like a collective breath: all the lightness of a dream and all the gravity of its abrupt end held in the same moment. The performers inhabit the space with conviction, moving fluidly from spoken verse to dance to beatbox and back again, each element reinforcing the urgency of the story being told.
For all its intensity, the production doesn’t leave you adrift in despair. Through bold movement, layered sound and precise shifts of pace, Dreamscape invites reflection on how narratives are shared, how bodies are seen, and how art can open doors to empathy and transformation.
