Traces/7 Doigts De La Main
Peacock Theatre
***

While We were Holding it Together/ Ivana Muller
Lilian Baylis at Sadler's Wells
***

To speak or not to speak? Most of the time dancers keep quiet, relying instead on a silent vocabulary of step and gesture to convey their meaning. The best choreography crafts a physical language that talks as eloquently as words, and it’s rare that steps are enhanced by speech.

There were two contrasting examples of this over the weekend, both at Sadler’s Wells venues, which, incidentally, is doing a roaring trade. At the Peacock was the very excellent long-runner Les 7 Doigts de la Main. The Canadian circus troupe features five performers, all wonderfully young and fabulously good looking, who undermine tip-top tumbling, spinning and acrobatics with dreary existentialist musings. The meaning of this and the meaning of that. Love, loss, the universe, trees, pollen, pyramids, planets. “Shut up,” you want to yell. “We’ve paid to watch you move, not philosophise.”

On the tumbling and juggling, Les 7 are great. The very small woman (Héloïse Bourgeois) is chucked around by four men, all of whom are ace tumblers and thrilling hoop divers. Their rag-tagity style mixes skate-boarding, Chinese poles and hand balancing, with Brad Henderson especially good at the single wheel, and Francisco Cruz a champion pole climber. They are all eye-poppingly good — if only they’d talk less.

Ivana Müller, by contrast, talks the right amount. The Zagreb-born, Amsterdam-based experimenter made her London debut at the Lilian Baylis on Friday with an oblique, original work that can only be described as “static” choreography. Her five performers stand, sit and recline completely still for 70 minutes. In one sequence, the lights dim and they change places but mostly they stay put. The paradox is that the effort of not moving produces micro movements in their muscles, which shudder with the strain.

Accompanying the involuntary motion is a dead-pan text of seemingly random reflections on the audience, the theatre, and what they might be — picnickers, a rock band, voyeurs? It sounds bonkers but it’s a fascinating reflection on being. We never stop thinking and moving, Müller seems to say. Our minds and muscles whirr away until we die. So enjoy yourself — it really is later than you think.
Traces until 14 March. Information: 0844 412 4300. www.sadlerswells.com.