Beginning the bill is Young-doo Jung’s “Voyage.” It’s an intentionally spacey piece, dancers one by one enter the big black void like lonely comets, tracing their arms and melting with exhales. Jung takes inspiration from NASA’s Voyager satellite. Launched in the seventies, Voyager has no set destination, rather it acts like a message in a bottle from mankind. Aboard are images from our home planet and a gold-plated record with some of our best musical exports: Javanese gamelan, Stravinsky, Peruvian indigenous songs.

The movement reflects imagery of space and of the etchings found on Voyager: the vitruvian man, anatomical diagrams, and golden ratios. The dancers draw lines and mark space with their extremities. Sometimes they look like orbiting satellites or automatons, at others like weightless, fragile jellyfish. The opening minutes highlight the sheer loneliness of the endeavour of these individuals, heading to who knows where as the custodians of our intellectual heritage. Recordings of humans greeting our distant alien neighbours in Earth’s many languages is particularly touching. 

Jung’s journey into an uncharted world however begins to feel like familiar territory. Few new ideas are introduced choreographically and sonically, which is a let down considering just how vast the catalogue within the Golden Record is. The ensemble comes together in one big finale, but the pathos feels forced. Only an eerie ending highlighting just how alone our intrepid wanderers are in the black beyond underlines the daunting task ahead of them.