As already hinted at by the title, the vocabulary of this choreography consists of gestures. Or more precisely it consists of picking up, imitating and elaborating on those little involuntary gestures, those glances, those eye and hand movements, the back and forth of getting to know each other. Sometimes those gestures are used verbatim, other times the choreography describes them using longer scenes that almost border on dance theater. The moose for instance – described in the opening words of the performance – is later seen moving through a chekovian birch grove, partly invisible behind the trees.

But the “involuntary” gesture is at the center of the choreography. And it turns out this is rather unwieldy material in a dance context. Unwiedly even though ritualistic dances using involuntary movements induced through drugs or religious visions are ancestors of current stage dance. Such movements loaded with momentum and speed can also be seen in ‘Like That, Like This’, however their purpose seems to be to emphasize those small gestures and glances that form the largest part of the performance. This is especially apperent since the “big” gestures tend to end in exhaustion, exhausting both themselves and the performers who remain laying on the floor.

Apart from these dynamics the dramatury of movement of this piece to formed by a continuous, incomplete process of the performers imitating each other: Like that! Like this? No like that! in numerous, recursive processes. This “stuttering” and the “involuntary” gestures together produce a very high fragility in the performance. This fragility is sometimes amplified through the partly coy and partly provoking smiles – or similar glances into the audience. The fragility leaves the audience in an insecure position: insecure behind the forth wall that is broken through those smiles and glances, insecure about the intention of the piece, and insecure because genre conventions cannot be relied on.

This insecurity is counteracted by the light and sound design (done by Bruno Pocheron and Boris Hauf respectively) who both build and expand upon the hint of dance theater in the piece. They take the audience onto a journey whose destination is more rooted in the phantasies of each observer than in the choreography.

While the material that ‘Like That, Like This’ uses is fascinating it was still difficult for me to establish a relation to either performers or the performance. Usage of those gestures and glances – in itself more a domain of theater than of dance – is not made easier by the fact that I as a viewer am more in the position of an uninvolved observer than in that of an addressee.

“Like That, Like This” was presented at fabrik potsdam and will be shown in Kampnagel / Hamburg.