Laura Boynes’ Equations of a Falling Body is more of a performance art happening than a dance show per se.

The piece is executed by three highly talented movers in Ella Rose Trew, James O’Hara and Timothy Green and O’Hara has a virtuosic opening solo where he spastically shakes, shudders, falls, slides, and curves about like a newly born creature.

Most of the rest of the choreography is raw, relatively uncomplicated and impulsive, being devised or refined in the moment.

Equations of a Falling Body. Photo © Chris Symes.

Boynes sits to the right of the action in a control booth, quietly speaking abstract instructions into a microphone feeding her voice into the performers’ ears. O’Hara also picks up an on-stage microphone at times to instruct the other two.

Ironically, this dramatises the agency of the dancers, rather than their submission to the voices in their ears. At one point on opening night, Trew and Green visibly rejected the instruction, circling with their hands on each other’s shoulders, even though O’Hara repeatedly barked: “No touching! No touching!”

It was clear, however, the internal logic of the particular interaction which Green and Trew had fallen into...