sarma

Seven bricolaged bodies in space, glided and spiralled, weaving complex patterns.

The ensemble then withdrew to the benches by the side of the naked stage, and a soloist was left encircling the ring of a penumbra.

Downstage, the string quartet and a harpsichordist from the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra played with astute intelligence. They incarnated the unfinished late work by Bach, The Art of Fugue in 18 variations.

The audience was alerted: To see the music and hear the dance.

The evening was nothing less than demanding, and only the sternest lovers of mathematics would be over-thrilled to witness the joint intellectualism of Bach and choreographer Amanda Miller.

For Miller did not simply translate music into pictures. In her own language, she developed a rigorous movement dialogue with Bach.

She harnessed the strictest of ballet tradition, but she also freed classicism into a more spatialised dynamic. Emphasising verticality, she explored within the canon, the unorthodox possibilities in the way and manner the body travels in space.

She braided movement and musicality into such intricate constellation in The Art of Fugue that she seemed to be questioning perception: What is the third space beyond sight and sound?

Therein, she also romanced the possible contemporary space where time, art, and effort conjoin the baroque era and today’s attitude.

To bracket Miller’s non-narrative work as entirely abstract would be too easy. Her exercise was not overly formal and exact either.

Her method of counterpoint to Bach’s musical geometry was to alternate between precise choreography and a game structure in which her turquoise-clad ensemble improvised, mimicked and led on one another.

At the same time, responding to live music, the dancers dealt in technical imperfections and forms of graceless grace.

By the end of the 100-minute performance, a strange effect arose from what was initially a dispassionate architecture of sound and movement.

Tailing a sense of melancholic humanity, and a slight nod to mankind’s noble frailty, was a glimpse into why Bach, for all his masterfulness, might not have wished to complete his titanic work anyway.