Greyish light fills the stage, colours almost don’t matter. 5 bodies: molecules of cosmic dust, enter to start the never ending wheel of the universe – turning, swinging, whirling, connecting together as transitory mechanisms. The sixth body is the musician, trying to shape the rhythm and direction of the performance within his pulsating trance-rock drumming and electronic soundscape. He is a frustrated thunder god in a spotlight, filling our ears with hypnotic but exhaustingly intense sound, like a persistent jazz solo.

The dancers develop motion pictures, repeatedly winding forward and back or becoming stuck like frozen sculptures – carpe diem moments within a continuous routine. Key structures, like oil pumps in a deserted field remind us of eternal life cycles. We can’t escape being a part of the ecumenical machinery, but TTTTTT has a tranquillizing effect – things taken as they are, turn out being not so harsh.

Elina Cire

How to confront the notion of time in dance? Guy Nader and Maria Campos tackle this tricky theme with a fine, abstract composition, conceived as a succession of movements in space that illustrate, through dance, how time unwinds itself.

Time Takes The Time Time Takes thoroughly digs into one specific dance motif. Repetitive, gyratory, pendulum movements trigger the dancers towards new spaces and body compositions in a system that loops over and over again.

Their travel through time and space will carry them to a crescendo of astounding lifts that burst into highly dynamic postures, or slow down, decrescendo, into pendulum movements – a beautiful image of human wheel spinning ends the piece.

Supported by a live percussionist, the piece unremittingly drives its audience into a hypnotic state: an impression of dizziness takes over as the dancers moves seem to flout gravity with their spiralling vertical heights.

A long moment of silent stillness commands our concentration, then a solitary, silver-clad dancer walks slowly to centre stage. She begins to swing her arm in a pendulum motion, rhythmically. The live, percussive score’s repeating tick-tock base line is already audible. One, then three more dancers join the first and begin a rolling flow of action and reaction. Counterbalance and counterweight are impulses for ceaseless momentum. The five dancers become mercury flowing over the floor, rarely breaking contact whilst imperceptibly morphing into cogs in a clock, a piston machine, or delicately balanced seesaws. Their immaculate, steely grey or blue costumes gradually crease, or show signs of sweat. The metallic human seesaw becomes the outline of a man cradling a child. Tiny glints of human nature flicker in this beautiful, sleek, mineral world – a world where precious time slips by unnoticed.