And so, on opening night, before a full house at Southbank Theatre’s Lawler Studio, Harvey presented “Holding You,” her exploration of “what it means to be held”[3] by the reassuring anchor of the familiar. To Harvey, “Gravity is what holds you in place,” that place being home. As such, the stage is lit by a standing lamp, positioned opposite a single chair. Two simple props that evoke a room for her dancers, Drew Hedditch and Montana Rubin, to inhabit. Two dancers, simultaneously, alight in the galaxy, held in fields of space, as Hedditch connects the soles of his feet to Rubin’s in an anticlockwise rotation, slowly unravelling on the floor. Joined, as if a mirror, two parts of a seamless whole, they are matter and space. “We can do a lot of spooning” sings Lonnie Johnson, “and loving by starlight.” Held in a ring of light, accompanied by Johnson’s distinctive note by note with a pick, his Looking for a Sweetie’s longing echoes Harvey’s own query: what happens if we become too heavy to hold, when “my whole life on you depends?” As Ruben arches her form up and over Hedditch’s left shoulder, her legs extend as if a shooting star, before encircling him, there is the sweet and hard of Johnson’s “am I dreaming dreams of you that’s all in vain?”[4] There is longing in the pas de deux, and accompanying shadow silhouettes, tenderness and promise.

There is up and there is down. To a study of gravity, a dance of two is what binds all the works presented, with Dimity Azoury and Zenin, in Zenin’s “In Conversation” poetic bond; Macy Trethewey and Corey Gavan fraying at the end-of-days in Coleman’s “Event Horizon;” Riley Lapham and Charlton Tough in Thió’s amplified sensation, “Study Number One;” and Milo Bayly and Henry Berlin in Lovegrove’s rupture to Tchaikovsky in the garden of “Gethsemane.” Even at the close, with Graham’s “Möbius” strip as a metaphor, Isobelle Dashwood and Jarryd Madden are matched by Aya Watanabe and Marko Juusela, “two couples evolving, adapting, and enduring without breaking”[5] across a continuous surface. Back-to-back, with interlinking arms, one cupping the sky above, the other tenting the earth below, the couples, in cut-out costumes referencing the twisted cylinder, reshape in response to an invisible force. Interlocking like the turning gears along the length of a möbius strip (a surface with one continuous side formed by cutting a single strip and twisting it prior to reattaching the two ends) they create a surface with a boundary.