The season celebrates this intrepid little company that Catherine Chappell and a host of pioneering stalwarts have kept viable for ten years. One rarely encounters such prolonged and heartfelt applause, nor indeed such a modest response from the dancers, after a performance.

The spirit of Leonardo da Vinci seemed to spread through the first dance, Trace Map, choreographed by Chappell. The space and the dancers were defined as  circles, lines, angles, arcs and  squares to navigate the history of the company’s journey to date, and motifs referenced previous works.

An audience very swiftly adjusts to the extraordinary technical demands and daring of aerial equipment that has the dancers more often high in the air than on the floor. (As one who often watches university professors and arts impresarios struggle for 20 minutes to get their PowerPoint presentations to work before abandoning them, I think this achievement should not pass without mention, and full credit to the stage crew.)

Short films were interspersed between live items: Union, by Alyx Duncan, was an impressive portrait of a man and his dog; Remotely Driven showed the fantasy life of a little girl; The Picnic was a hysterically funny and brilliantly styled surreal journey that Lewis Carroll could have wished to produce.

A mighty impressive duel between two Greek gods, Hephaestus & Ares, was as breath-taking for the audience as it was for the dancers. Spoke, by Malia Johnston, was another study of the spinning circles and spirals that lift the floor up into the vertical. The classic Lusi’s Eden, starring Lusi Faiva and everyone, was as entertaining and beautiful as I’d remembered  since 2001. The ending steals your heart.

But perhaps it was Amir-Spinnaret, choreographed by Felicity Molloy, to an aching song by Leonard Cohen, that gave the evening an almost unbearable poignancy. The dancers journeyed slowly, each in their own way, across the stage from east to west, from alpha to omega.  Everything was here caught.

Some of the movement is graceful, some is blurringly exciting. Oh by the way, I forgot to tell you that one of the dancers has Downs Syndrome, another has only two working limbs, one has no working limbs at all, two need wheel chairs … etc.  So who’s counting?   
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