Whiteish costumes, whiteish floor, whiteish lights, whiteish noise. You could call the choreography white-on-white too: there’s no colour contrast in Gala Moody and Michael Carter’s duet, only the inexorable blending of monochromes. A slow circling of the stage perimeter shades into inward spirals, which morph into cyclical shifts of place and plane. It’s like watching the orbits of planets, or particles moving in some magnetic forcefield.
Eventually, the dancers seem to become sentient, though only distantly conscious of each other. Moody seems to struggle and expire; Carter carries her dead weight. They cross paths but don’t connect; they chase each other, but to no end.
If the duet as a whole is rather overextended, its individual sections nevertheless show both compositional rigour and a stark, sometimes haunting beauty.
