A primordial melodrama explodes from a weightless dramaturgy. Lit as the glass case of a natural science museum, the scene is oxygenated yet bare.

Underlining the dancers’ exposure is not flesh appearing through costumes but their voices. They create an alliance between the wild, lyrical call of some extinct animal and Liszt’s majestic Faust Symphony. The costumes, normal clothes the dancers themselves redesign on their shapes, highlight their tempers while extending the usual erogenous spots to the whole figure, making nudity “undressable”. Adrienn Hod’s baroque choreographic writing doesn’t forget its noble roots. Part two is a bacchanal on pointe, in which the dancers, like gods, are together but alone, communicating only through their characterising excesses. Within the disharmonious, loud beauty onstage the epilogue is a pause, as this blasting piece actually never started and will never end.

Hungarian choreographer Adrienn Hod’s deceptively spontaneous, outrageously horny operatic cartoon is set to Liszt’s Faust Symphony. Tireless Marcio Canabarro, Emese Cuhorka, Julia Garai and Csaba Molnar begin by tearing and tucking each other’s leotards and tights into OTT tat; it’s as if a handful of strippers have taken over a ballet studio. What ensues is a comedy of grotesque extremes, ridiculous melodrama and grovelling lust, balls-to-the-wall and tits to the fore, as show-off virtuosity is sent helter-skelter on tidal waves of twitchy, shrieky self-dramatisation. The unbridled cast whole-heartedly mock both themselves and classical form via splits, backbends and much febrile crotch/ass-fixation. It’s buttock-jigglingly good fun even if the vulgar sexual antics start stretching thin. The piece runs out of invention rather than steam, but maybe the point is to rub our faces in humanity’s cyclical behaviour patterns, juvenilia and gross excess. This willingness to go so skilfully, wackily ape-shit is very winning.

A woman storms into a crowded hospital room screaming hysterically. She’s here to wreak vengeance. And so she demolishes the place, clinging to the others while pushing them to the walls and ground. Her muscles are taut, movements sweeping and exaggerated. It’s a scene from a Venezuelan telenovela that went viral some time ago. All of this came to mind during Hodworks’ performance. The dancers seem to be both an afterlife of over-blown operatic emotions and their physical manifestations. The group dives into the cultural reservoir of third-hand forms and affects to tear them apart, twist them, put them on and let them emerge as deranged and beautiful compositions. It’s an emotional drag show. Only the surface of the body is on ecstasy, but it makes both the inside and the outside vibrate.