Noé Soulier's Le Royaume des Ombres (The Kingdom of Shades) was a very analytical, almost clinical look at 19th century ballet. Dressed in a loose grey tshirt and tiny blue shorts, he looked more like he was in the rehearsal studio rather than on-stage but this suited well his experiments with balletic movement material. The first of these experiments involved taking the movement vocabulary of ballet i.e. allongé, arabesque, balancé and performing these actions in alphabetical order. As there was no musical accompanient to Soulier's work, we could hear through his breathing how much effort was being exerted to perform these actions, particularly as they lacked their natural preparation steps which would have been especially useful to aid his take off in the various jetés. Next, he performed simply the preparation steps which, somewhat surprisingly, seemed to contain a lot more movement and travel than the previous sequence. Whereas the previous movement had been spatial and structural, now suddenly Soulier was darting around the stage. Pas de bourrés and glissades without their attendant pirouettes and jetés were particularly amusing to watch, and it showed the original material for what it really was: a series of impressive tricks. Further exploring these ideas, Soulier went on to rearrange solos from, amongst others, La Bayadère, Giselle and Swan Lake, performing both male, female and 'fantastic mystical being' roles and splicing up the material into an original arrangement.

Without music or any prevalent sense of aesthetic design overall, this felt quite soulless to me. It was perhaps interesting to see that it takes more than just putting balletic movement material in a sequence in order to make it expressive, but it's not really very enlightening. What was interesting, however, was to see how close to his process Soulier had taken us, and how vulnerable he seemed on stage. His frequent trips to his water bottle and the period he spent talking and marking through the next sequences he was going to perform while trying to catch his breath highlighted how disguised the natural requirements of the human body are in dance and in particular in ballet. I felt quite uncomfortable when Soulier was trying to talk but was barely able to as he could hardly breathe and yet you could see the weight of the audience's expectation upon him to perform for us. I did suspect that this was a highly-orchestrated interlude, as although he didn't appear suitably recovered from his previous exertions, he proceeded to move upstage and suddenly exploded into his most virtuosic and expansive grand allegro dancing of the performance. Perhaps it was all an illustration of his point but as anyone watching who has dance experience will recognise, the suffering and the pushing of the body is a very real part of dance and Soulier bravely exposed this to the audience whereas many dancers would prefer to conceal it.

Continuing with the 19th century ballet theme, D'un pays lointain (From Another Land) was a fascinatingly playful exploration of balletic mime from this period in ballet history. Opening with a sequence of theatrical gestures with the more literal mime being relatively easy to interpret and some gestures which could have 'meant' anything as far as I was concerned, this quickly become a very detailed conversation between two dancers. When the voice over started, the more abstract gestures became understandable; gestures became literal and by seeing similar gestures together, we could begin to see how the vocabulary of this form worked. Through clever juxtaposition of dancers and voiceover, we saw how the same gesture could could have multiple related meanings either with synonyms i.e. damn, condemn and imprison or in a visual sense, much like the grammar of sign language, with swan and fly having the same mimed action. To a cascading soundscape of words, complex compositional pictures were built as the number of dancers accumulated. Poetic rhythmic patterns like the 'rounds' of Frère Jacques became visible, the statuesque structure of the dancers' bodies built pictures like photographs and the multiple streams of action became so complex at one point that it felt like watching multiple TV news channels simultaneously. This piece was very entertaining and showed how interesting pantomime can be when it it is deployed creatively rather than to communicate plot that would either take too long or be too open to varying interpretations through dance.

The absolute highlight of the evening was Fidelity Project, choreographed and performed by Frauke Requardt and Freddie Opoku-Addaie, which was originally commissioned for The Place Prize in 2010. This was a complex piece which moved with lightning speed from gentle, tender embraces to shockingly explosive violence. Requardt is the type of dancer who you can't take your eyes off when she is onstage. Her sharp features framed by a Sassoon-style bob and obvious strength in her body belie a readily accessible emotional vulnerability in performance. Opoku-Addaie moved fluidly between tenderness, 'lost boy' and writhing agony and the combination of the two created an enigmatic and beautiful duet.

The pink popcorn vending stall provided a cheerful set and sensory overload as the smell of the popping corn filled the auditorium. Its explosive action and the moreish desire it inspired provided the perfect metaphor for the relationship between the dancers and the reason they kept returning to each other despite the consequences of their partnering.

This was a great triple bill of threee very different works, and if it hadn't been for the detachment I felt because of the clinical analysis of the first piece, it would have been a 4 star evening.