Iván Pérez offers grip in borderline society

Ukraine, Boko Haram, IS, the economic crisis. The world resembles a borderline patient, as Ricardo Semler states. Dance festival CaDance also likes to hold a mirror up to politicians and power. With Exhausting Space by Spanish choreographer Iván Pérez succeeds just fine.

On Thursday, February 12, the adaptation of the earlier Attention, the doors are closing! premiered. Actually, Exhausting Space about a "greater sense of separation and the need to connect" in this age of globalisation. But you can so project your own impression of world tensions onto it.

Exhausting Space is not an evening of dance fun. It is dead serious dance. Fifty shades of grey, but without you-know-what. Three dancers move continuously around patterns of black-painted eggs. There is no hope, rhythm, colour or humour. Except when an egg breaks and someone has to get to work with a bucket and mop.

No gekylian here either. Ex-NDT dancer Pérez has his own movement style. Unstyled lots of moving across the floor, falling and standing up, tumbling around each other, hooking up, pushing away. All organic with a constant flow and total body control. A magnificent solo by the choreographer himself underlines the power of his dance. Which impresses with the driving rhythm of Rutger Zuyderveldt's electronic music.

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Everything so far has the look of a video installation in a side room of a modern museum. But it does not stop at a sombre non-stop motion play. The eggs are gathered in a nest, as if under a brood lamp.

Then an elongated symbiosis begins, a dance trinity in perpetual motion that is supposed to symbolise all that is good. It just doesn't get too soft in the warm, orange light. The resolution after the pressure, the but remaining silent, the dedication of the dancers and their endurance, it gets to you.

Originally, Exhausting Space was made at Ballet Moscow. With dance, you won't easily be persecuted there, as Dangerous Acts in Belarus. But it also shows itself to be a unique means of imagining reality and taking a break from it.

Exhausting Space can be seen on 13 and 14 February during CaDance and will go on tour in spring 2016. See korzo.co.uk for more information.