Five dancers shimmer in and out of a surreal plane. They are flesh-and-blood beings and yet the human experience they're embodying is something fragile, something that — like the dancers in this opening tableau — is balanced precariously on the tips of its toes.
From the sides of the stage, industrial fans stir up an ominous gale-force wind that invisibly imposes itself on the space. At the same time, light — also beamed in from the sides — casts the dancers in a sepia haze. It's as though they're behind a veil, perhaps drifting into the grim darkness, teetering in and out of reality, like ghosts fading from existence, edging towards their doom. Or perhaps transforming, mutating into something not entirely human.
Also present is the haunting soundtrack, a score that combines recorded sounds, many of them industrial, infused with guttural human utterances, like sickly breathing, protracted inhalations and cumbersome exhalations.
It all adds up to something slightly nightmarish and unnerving. Akin, perhaps, to the aftermath of some sort of extinction event, its bleak imagery drawn from some post-apocalyptic future.
Yet there are symbols of delight, too. In the dancers' arms are water-filled plastic bags, reminiscent of those used to convey goldfish from one aquarium to the next. The bags light up, perhaps hints of hope in the darkness.
The imaginary goldfish are — possibly — a reference to memory. And, its opposite: forgetting. Or perhaps they symbolise environmental ecosystems, life contained within a fragile world. Puncture the plastic bags and the goldfish have had it, no turning back.
The work is e.ID: A Fugue, a dance show on steroids. The latest production by Cape Town's Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre, its strands of possible meaning seem infinite.
Its five dancers — Gemma Trehearn, Rian Jansen, Tamsyn Pretorius, Gala Winkler and Aphiwe Sodlamba — are strong, limber, athletic and apparently rehearsed to the knife-edge of perfection. Yet it is their tiny, imperceptible "imperfections" that make what they do all the more compelling. Just as their skill and grace know no parallel in the realm of algorithms and robots, it's their humanness that cannot be replicated by machines. Part of what holds the audience in awe is the sometimes excruciating tension between the dancers' intense focus and the ever-present possibility that something might go wrong.
There's their defiance of gravity, poise, rhythm, athletic acumen and their skilful adherence to the timing of the music, the stunningly concentrated stamina that enables them to go on like this for 75 minutes. It is hard, intense, sometimes heavy, work that is without reprieve, not a moment to press pause, take breaks or wipe away the sweat.
It isn't just the precariousness of their steps nor the physical extremes to which they're pushed that make them enthralling to watch, though. The show is epic in its conception, kind of furious, moody, exhausting, visually peculiar and perplexing, a wholehearted feast as much for the eyes as for the imagination. The dancers come to it invested, a staggering feat requiring them to use their bodies to express urgent ideas that are, in many ways, unsayable.
All the dancers' physical endeavours are in service of questions brought into the rehearsal studio by choreographer Louise Coetzer, who co-founded Darkroom Contemporary in 2010. The company is rooted in dance but operates against the grain, following processes that have deeper parallels in the realm of performance art than in more commercially accessible ballet. They regularly integrate technologies and original music into the work, perform in unconventional spaces and have created dance films which, like their live performances, have been a source of international acclaim.
A signature of Coetzer's work is her refusal to create easygoing entertainment. She leans towards complex and difficult themes. One recent Darkroom production, autoplay (incidentally showing at Stellenbosch's Woordfees in October), critically examines the relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence by using algorithms to collaborate on an "AI dance opera".
World-class is another way to describe what Darkroom does. And e.ID, which earlier this week was performed in the Netherlands, is no exception.
The ideas it explores concern us all: the state of humanity at a time when our sovereignty faces risk of being absorbed by digital technologies that are increasingly beyond the realm of human understanding. It is, in Coetzer's words, an exploration of "what it means to be human in a digitally mediated age".
It ponders our place in an increasingly topsy-turvy world, reflecting "on the shifting nature of human identity within this contemporary condition".
"The whole thing is a meditation on mortality: The breath, the water, the light … all of that is life. But breath also ends, it doesn't go on forever. What does remain, though, are all those traces in the digital realm. They remain forever."
Coetzer says an initial impulse for e.ID was to create a work resembling the structure of a musical fugue, so there are six episodes threaded together by thematic curiousness and by a gestural and movement language that haunts the work.
Meaning emerges through repetition, variation and association rather than linear narrative. Developed specifically for the show, the score works as more than music for the dancers to move to. It throbs and aches, pulses and torments and drives itself underneath your skin. The oozing vocals and uncanny sounds underscore the sense of unnerving horrors that lay in wait.
It all makes for an astonishing, often enchanting, whole. And though not all the dancing is necessarily "pretty" in the conventional sense, there are plenty of profoundly beautiful movements, including a duet that, during the show's world premiere at Pretoria's State Theatre last month, held the audience in captivated awe.
Not that crowd-pleasing is important for Coetzer. "I wouldn't even show the work if I didn't have to," she says. "It's not necessarily about the end product. It's not about who sees it or what people think about it. There's a lot of fulfilment that comes from stretching ourselves and challenging ourselves."
Creating work like this is "hugely taxing", Coetzer says. It is not only physically challenging for the dancers but the process is never simple and, like most things requiring deep contemplation, takes time. "It eats you up," she says.
She is ultimately less concerned about the finished product than going through the hard labour of creating it. "The process of making the work is where you find what you're searching for."
Which says something about the danger of handing over creative processes to algorithms simply because they arrive at a result faster. It's the friction experienced during the act of creating that is the real payoff for creative humans because the learning resides in the doing, in the struggle of hard work.
Coetzer calls it "the alchemy of the creative process".
It's why she returns to the studio, time and again, to create new work. "It's because there's nothing else like it. It's a complete process of understanding. In making the work, I'm trying to understand the world and my place in it. Having the opportunity to do that with other creative people is amazing. To go through that labour of figuring it out and learning about one another's ways of seeing the same thing that we're trying to understand. That's the thing that always draws me back."
What's fundamental too — and a key focus for Darkroom Contemporary — is that the work attempts to push the art form into new dimensions. And to push audiences, too.
"Audiences are going to take vastly different things from this show," Coetzer says. "That's totally fine. I think it's important to be able to ignite a remembering that we can feel very deeply. If a work can achieve that, whatever that feeling is, it's a good thing."
While e.ID deals with existential threats to human identity, it is also, in various ways, looking at the physical reality of our world. Be it the madness of warmongering or the unchecked roll-out of artificial intelligence, Coetzer says she worries about the various changes happening that cannot necessarily be reversed.
The final sequence is described in the programme as an epilogue, subtitled "apnoea". It involves an onstage costume change, a silent meditation that felt to me like an elegy for a disappearing species on a fragile world, our final death knell concocted by a cabal of suited plutocrats.
"Yes," Coetzer says. "The truth is coming. That ending speaks about irreversible transformation.
"Once water is released from the punctured bag, the bag can never hold water again. It's forever changed, the particles are released. Whether it's a transformation of 'leaving behind' or 'stepping into a new', the breath ends. So, there is death and a new beginning.
"It's that sense of change, the finality of it and the irreversibility of it that is the message."