Nine works in three sentences

We loll and lie on cushions and pillows, but are we softened up so that we can take a hard message (about women’s reproductive autonomy) or so that we can get comfortable together? Both, really: this guided experience led by six women slips between closed-circle conversations, small acts of shaking and shuddering, open-invitation somatic exercises, consciousness-raising, utopian thinking and sensorial immersion. Although we stay together in the same room, by the end of the two hours we have all somehow moved to a different, dreamier place.

Two performers channel the spirit of Lucinda Childs’ 1970s minimalist classic Dance. A germinal balletic phrase goes right and left and front and back and round and round, with incremental variations. It’s all clean, quiet (we don’t hear the dancers’ click track) and resolutely untheatrical – except for one moment, which brings on a dramatic throb of footlights and a surge of orchestral music from Giselle, like the ghost of 1840s Paris passing over the stage of 1970s New York.

Where the synthetic (bright toys, aquamarine gloop, plastics, elastics) meets the prosthetic (rubberised skin grafts, hair and eyelash extensions, acrylic nails as long as rulers), there lives an unheimlich family of three humanoids, playing games at once innocent and creepy, and drawing parallels between the core temperature of the earth and that of the human body. In their midst is something organic: the fibrous, snake-like root of a plant, which they coddle as their baby, feeding it with lurid red gunk and wrapping it in plastic nappies. Seriously, I fear for our future.

Planetary explorer Netti Nüganen emerges naked from a dune of dust, and reports – via toy intercom – on the detritus she unearths: handbag, coffee beans, lengths of cloth, casino chips. She talks to herself (with spot-on coming timing) but also becomes aware of an uncanny off-stage presence: a wigged, rubber-lipped bogey figure who stalks the wings of the stage and the fringes of the auditorium. All of a sudden, the show combusts into volcanic, punk-rock vocalisations that burn through all such dust and distance; it’s quite a blast!

A choreographic étude informed and accompanied by a John Cage lecture, for seven performers as formally dressed as chamber musicians, plus an eighth empty spotlight. Cage’s words make for a cryptic score as the dancers move in composed sections and step along lines as set and as structured as a musical stave, with vacant space as their constant companion. Very serious, very studious.

It starts as a queer costume drama: two men abandon their dolphin-shaped pet balloon and decide to remove each other’s black plastic outerwear, lurid stretchy innerwear, and finally each other’s high-heeled boots, all while teetering in close hold on a single skateboard. It proceeds – via floral nightgowns and finally trackies and trainers – as a series of earthbound, intensely physical movement explorations based on clasping and unclasping, circling, spiralling and rolling. Let’s parse that trajectory: a fall from a stylised and impossibly awkward balancing act into an organically fluent attempt at physical communion.

At once strangely cosmic – we spiral round the performance space like a turning galaxy, orbiting the spinning energies of two male dancers – and physically concrete: we might also feel like a flock of sheep, bunching and dispersing as the men wolfishly circle and separate us. Their precise choreography of ravels and unravellings, wheeling leans and striding gyrations seems to extend far beyond the intensely internal focus of their duet, encompassing us all in its rotating forcefield. Simple, effective, and immersive without being coercive – a class act.

What is love, and will I ever hold its candle for someone, or someone hold it for me? Grėtė Šmitaitė, scrunching her face with feeling and acting out the sentiments of pop songs, is writing letters to her dead grandfather because she wanna know what love is – but is she burning the candle, or does it burn through her? Good question, but I didn’t feel the heat…

A big black sack with a dangling horsetail, a forest of hanging ribbons, a colony of inflated rubber gloves, a stepladder, candles, a massive metronome waving a white flag. That’s a lot of scenographic clutter, even before the addition of two women, who ask if we have time to talk about God, bounce interminably on trampolines to annoying music, and list everyday worries (sleeping through the alarm, etc.) which they reckon will turn out find in the end. Should they have worried more, I wondered, about one item on that list: “The concept will make the piece.”