The show opens, as we expect them, with a dim lit palate of slow-motion vignettes, followed soon after by a cacophonous sound of three falling books. Softly muted costuming in medieval hues, designed by Alison Reynolds, swathes the dancers’ bodies, with increasingly easy-to-see lighting to eventually pick out luminous flesh. The lighting design by Michael Goodwin and Brandon Ross deserves special mention for encapsulating colour sound and movement within its spectrum. Pitt Street Theatre is an up close and personal space and in spite of tier-seating, the stage proximity meant that floor-based movement was otherwise easily lost. This meant that glorious dynamics of a latter solo performed by Caleb Heke was hard to see other than the occasional leg lift or leap in the air.

Jacob Reynolds’s choreography is an intriguing mix of dancer’s individual taste for movement and the hefty synopsis described in the programme – “Multiple men who claim they can speak to God, twelve apostles, sixteen wives …”. There were four dancers and much ripping of books, clearly not Bibles, that left me wondering about the power of the choreographer to harness these two distinctive ends of the creative movement scale. I draw on some of the graphic intention of the programme notes: ‘Upheaval’ becomes a vortex of spinal movements and high-speed lifts, ‘descent into madness’ is a dancer tearing her book to shreds and shoving paper against her body. Some moments of authentically portrayed emotion, as unexplained characters switch unexplained roles.

There is a rhetoric occurring here beyond the absurd, that inspires a willingness to just sit back and enjoy the 50 minutes of expressively engaged dancers sharing their movement response to a wild, artistic exploration. It is true, in ‘an era of social upheaval’ where ‘constructs cease to function’, this chaotic, and sometimes very lovely, dancing by all four dancers, Caleb Heke, Elani Austin-Tennant, Lulu Qiu and Sharvon Mortimer, who exit at the end of the dance abruptly, centre stage through a broken window, does invite us ‘into a domain of belief, manipulation and prophets, counterfeit or otherwise’. Münster, as with other contemporary dance shows of late, deserves more time for viewing for us to see beyond the clunkiness of the production’s birthing. To properly see the extent of the artists’ vision as each work transforms on the performance scene.

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