Sounds, sights and some surprises

Amy Redmond samples the flavour of the performances at 'Haunted' in the City Arts Centre, as part of the Fringe festival

All sorts of madcap investigations are ongoing at Haunted in the City Arts Centre, where the building has been given over to a themed series of art, sound, video and performance works.

They vary from one-off affairs to weekly 10-minute rolling shows, and live installations catering to one audience-member at a time. Yara el Sherbini, a London based artist with a Palestinian background performed Narratives of the Other & Traces, in which, one at a time, people crept into her sand-covered six-feet-by-six-feet cage and watched her meditation on territory. With her wrists bandaged and attached to pulleys weighed down by sand bags, this tiny slave-like creature stencilled numbers into the sand and rubbed them out, each time hanging up a strip of the Financial Times.

Frances Kay's spent a night alone in the building and documented her experience in If you Bring a Rattle. She then invited people to watch the film and hear about Nora, a ghost who came to her in a story she was compelled to write that night.

Aoife Desmond's Memory of Water featured a girl in a dress decorated with tiny water bottles who, every day stood frozen in silence for two hours at an open window looking out on to the Custom House, the Vodafone billboards and the Spire beyond. She curiously seemed to embody Nora, locked up in the stocking factory that may once have operated from this building.

The most haunting performance was Loose Canon's Fragments of a Dead Performance. From inside an eight-seat canvas tent, Lady Macbeth (Deirdre Roycroft) was projected in front of us upside-down using the camera obscura technique.

Utterly chilling, this ghost droned first and crescendoed into a mesmerising 10 minutes of condensed verse before fading to a whisper and as the face receded all we were left with was the wringing hands before the image evaporated.

Capturing the essence of Haunted, however, Back Up, co-ordinated by Anne Seagrave and Oscar McLennan, is a spectacular evening involving the mind-bending, often hilarious creations of more than 15 artists.

The colourful Frieda Lilo, our MC (Roisin Kehoe) invites us in to Part 1 - a free-for-all where the audience wanders from room to room looking at different installations, videos and durational performances. Daunting though it may be not to know what is around each corner, at least there a certain safety in numbers. Some works are so curious you might dwell on them for some time, while others may give you the impulse to turn on your heels in search of anything as long as it is mildly comprehensible.

From a dimly lit creature alone in a room filling its head with stones to the tune of an international brass band, to a cleverly filmed re-working of a Mr Muscle advertisement, to a life coach whose worksheet promises you the eight steps to success, the atmosphere is giddy in what could only be described as a wacky postmodern carnival. Lilo then guides us into Part 2 - a cinematic feast which includes live performance - warning us it would last for 192 hours with no intermission. This is a game of hit and miss like all performance art, where some concepts work wonderfully and others scare you into believing Lilo's warning. Anita Ponton's film-noir-inspired Unspool is superb and Lisa Marie Johnson's Ceremony of the Underdog is curiously charming. Tommy Weir's re-make of RTÉ's Angelus is hilarious, but the highlight is the balletic diggers in Anne Troake's film, Pretty Big Day. A must see.

Back Up runs until tomorrow and Haunted runs until Oct 17th