Live arts company The Artful Badger presents this entrancing hour of wild dance and play, performed in one of London’s most exhilarating venues. If you’ve not experienced The Vaults before, it’s worth venturing down there just for a drink or two, or three – there’s a mesmerising network of indigo-lit underground tunnels-turned-performance-spaces, a bar and even an Italian restaurant overhead: you can hear the intermittent screams of a murder mystery being played out to guests in accompaniment to their meatballs.

This place is all about the senses and The Artful Badger has certainly tapped into this aspect of the space with Wild Worlds, a curated selection of performances exploring ‘the animal instinct of the human condition’. Whilst the show description boasts its propensity to take its audience to another world, it was hard to forget where you were with the sporadically dripping ceiling and the hum of the tube overhead. This however, only added to the visceral nature of the piece and I’d even suggest that the work benefited from the energising sense of liveness it acquired from its location.

It’s evident that this is touring work created for the festival scene, and with that in mind I have to admit that I spent much of the piece imagining the different effect The Artful Badger’s work must have in the summer months, performed to a crowd of lively festival-goers. Here in The Vaults however, the piece certainly used the veiled darkness of the tunnel to their advantage and created an installation-like performance which slowly revealed the depth of the space to its audience; this gradual revelation being one of the most exciting elements of the piece. Wild Worlds pinnacles with narrator Andy Black’s Follow The Faun: Running with the Sun, an interactive dance adventure, perhaps better appreciated on the last night of Secret Garden Party, but good fun nonetheless and all the better for seeing a initially reserved audience get loose with their air-humping skills.

The first two movement pieces by Zoe Cobb were simple and entrancing, and the individual performances were nuanced yet retained a real sense of the ensemble – I particularly liked the performers joining the audience for Andy Black’s final piece, tapping back into that aforementioned liveness and giving the work more of an immersive feel. Aedin Walsh’s aerial ropes performance Skin pushed the show into a darker place, but retained the same fluidity and grace that made the first two performances so captivating. Each of the four performances were equally bold and exciting, however put together the whole thing felt a little fragmented, with the connecting narration allowing a welcome break from the intensity of the action, but also an interruption that felt a bit like a time-filler.

Back in the bar, and despite the rapidly growing crowd, it still feels a bit like you’ve stumbled upon a well-kept secret. I suppose that’s the nature of the space and of the organised chaos of the scene – though surrounded by people, the individual tunnels still feel intimate and the performances, personal. Wild Worlds: Dark Sides is certainly not one for the faint-hearted, but is a truly refreshing experience if you’re open to the wild spirit of the piece and ready to lose your inhibitions and throw yourself into the action head first.

Wild Worlds: Dark Side is playing at the Vault Festival until 14 February. For more information and tickets, see the Vault Festival website.