This conceptual performance project explored the stairs of the Southbank Centre as a site where architecture becomes affective and performative. Positioned between the severity of brutalist concrete and the playful interruption of bright yellow softened stairs, the work investigated how environments act upon the body, and how space shapes movement, mood, and behaviour before thought intervenes. The stairs were reframed as soft play, an invitation to tumble, pause, and misbehave within an otherwise imposing architectural language.

Performers entered the space dressed as boxes, rigid, uniform, and slightly absurd, embodying architecture itself while attempting to negotiate joy, awkwardness, and belonging. Their actions formed a theatrical dialogue between hardness and softness, control and release. Sound was incorporated as an active element, responding to movement and surface, amplifying footfalls, collisions, and rhythms, and transforming the environment into a sensory partner. The piece functioned as an interoperation between body, costume, architecture, and sound, presenting space not as static backdrop but as an emotional and performative force that shapes experience from the inside out.