In Silenzio, playful bustle meets the slow passing of time ★★★★☆

Sometimes you hardly see her taking a step. Emma Bogerd calmly crosses the stage against a color-changing back wall. Because of Jeroen Smith’s razor-sharp lighting design, she looks like an apparition in airy white clothing. It seems a thankless role, as a dancer for an hour to make your physical virtuosity subservient to stepping at walking pace on that one backline. Yet it is an all-important contribution to Silenziothe new dance performance by LeineRoebana, for which the choreographer duo collaborates with the live accordionist Renée Bekkers and cellist Ketevan Roinishvili.

All the playful eruptions of movement of the seven other dancers on the spacious stage, all the growling, scratching, grunting and sighing on strings, knobs, valves and keys, almost seems like a fuss over nothing, compared to the passage of time, the slow footstep as a metaphor for a glimpse of eternity. That’s what makes the contrast Silenzio so fascinating.

Not all the emergence and disappearance of the dancers reveal their logic. Sometimes it feels random when, after an energetic tableau full of arms outstretched crosswise and stubbornly frolicking legs, they go off through the wings or settle down on stools next to the musicians. They exchange the cloudy, ominous breath of an accordion classic like The Profundis off with the crossed swords of cello and accordion in in Croce, both of 91-year-old Russian Sofia Gubaidulina. Three times they please the audience with instrumental parts from Mille Regretz by the French Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez – two dancers fall silent in a cautious, moving embrace. But then the cellist blasts on to glowing risers and fallers from George Crumbs Sonata for solocello (part 3. Toccata). The often humming, spiky music constantly pokes the dancers in the feet. Except with Bogerd. It remains calm.