For performer or audience?

Ellipsis is a dance piece that focuses heavily on ideas but, unfortunately, doesn’t evoke the concrete feelings expected from this kind of performance. As an experimental and experiential movement piece lauded as “a new dance work inhabiting the space between thoughts, time and light”, it has every opportunity to pull the audience into its sensory vortex, but something essential seems amiss.

The music is a perfect accompaniment; at times atmospheric, discordant, droning and in other parts tranquil, serene and transient. And I love how the audience get their own earphones that cocoons them in their own cosy world of sound, intensifying each shift in tone. If the choreography followed suit, this would have been a dazzling show.

The first 15-minute piece was repetitive in movement and so there was no arc and I didn’t decipher any understanding from it. When I see a movement piece I trust what I feel (sensory or emotional) to anchor me within the performance, but with this piece I felt like an accidental bystander.

At the end of the second piece, there is a truly poignant moment when the performer looks out at the audience, a simple gesture of a smile and hands over head to shadow his eyes from the light, and it’s exquisitely moving. For me to enjoy this show, there needed to be more moments like this where some sort of truth is revealed.

This show looks to have been created for the performer alone, which is fine, but if you make this choice I think you risk alienating the audience. Or maybe I just didn’t get it and you need to go along and decide for yourself.