Probe’s Running on Empty offers an eerie world inhabited by three individuals simultaneously detached from and tangled up with one another. Through a combination of music, sung vocals, spoken text, and movement, narratives are suggested, but never explained. The work opens with Probe’s Artistic Director Antonia Grove singing to Scott Smith’s folksy, bluesy sounds. As Grove steps back from the microphone, Greig Cooke’s twisting, articulate movements, punctuated by questions directed at Grove, set the tone for their tangled, convoluted relationship.

Many of the images provided by the text are poignant, and a little surreal. The performers offer them up and then leave them to hang in the space, floating just beyond the grasp of logic. Water is a re-occurring theme, with dark undertones of drowning and death. But death is accepted as just one phase of a larger stream of existence, and Grove and Cooke grapple both with this acceptance, and with each other. There is a wildness in them. In one particularly visceral section, their bodies tumble into and ricochet off of one another, attacking, struggling, and eventually relenting. I am reminded of the sheer weight of another person, and the burden that it can be.

Other movement sections do not resonate as much, seeming hampered by a slightly limited movement language, or, as in the case of the performers’ transformation into various animals, introducing a new idea that does not integrate into the rest of the work.

Sometimes Grove, Cooke, and Smith seem to talk to each other, sometimes at, over, or across one another, communicating, but not quite communicating. It is an appropriate reflection of my relationship to the work; sometimes Running on Empty communicates powerfully and clearly, other times less so. But then such is the complexity of relationships.

Smith and his music stray in and out of the relationship set up between Grove and Cooke. The musical interludes do not always seem to fit, but their slightly surreal, dissonant quality appears to be in keeping with Grove’s interest in exploring the way that dance, spoken word, and music can exist together in discord as well as harmony. I would like to know more about what purpose this discord serves.

Grove, Cooke, and Scott are all billed as performers. But although Grove sings, and all three use text, Grove and Cooke are clearly ‘dancers’ while Smith stays rooted in the area allocated to the instruments for most of the show, and does not engage as physically in the work despite having a background in dance and performance practices. Perhaps the work did not call for it, but it might have been interesting to see a little more disregard for the divisions between musician and mover.

I sense that there is more to this work than I am able to appreciate in one viewing and that its understated nature belies its depth. Running on Empty does not try to sweep you up, or pull you in, but it offers a stark, distinct world that is dark and desperate, yet curiously calm.