When a flirtatious yet occasionally frenetic chair game begins, the first tectonic shift in the narrative occurs as the two soloists finally notice one another. Left alone by the ensemble before a dense cluster of chairs, they embark on a dance of mutual exploration. It is a delicious scene of hesitant seduction. Germain Louvet brings expressive intensity, every gesture deliberate and measured, while Hannah O’Neill is both profound and tender, capturing the vulnerability of a heart beginning to open. The act concludes with Louvet left alone on stage, performing a series of complex pas de basque, his movements cutting through the growing obscurity of the theatre. As the lights fade, we are left with the sense that a first threshold has been crossed, and that the best still awaits.

The scenography shifts as eight towering trees constructed from squared wooden planks come to dominate the stage. This new chapter is ushered in by the four garden guardians, who emerge ever more clearly as hierophants of love and bizarre interpreters of the artificial park of classical convention in which the scene takes place. Eight women enter in enormous eighteenth-century pannier dresses, their giggles punctuating the air, followed by O’Neill in a striking, regal purple gown. Movement turns into mockery and subverts Mozart’s operatic interactions, as the dancers repeatedly collapse into exaggerated parodies of sentimental vapours. As the layers of courtly artifice gradually peel away, scene after scene, crawling and passionate kisses replace constrained elegance, exposing the instinctual underside of a society built on control and display.

Games continue through a clear reference to blind man’s buff: Hannah O’Neill reenters with the gardeners and is soon turned from the blind to the investigated. She becomes an inert object of study, handled with the clinical detachment of a specimen under a microscope. This moment acts as the final catalyst, pushing the narrative towards its emotional breaking point, sealed by the concluding pas de deux of the soloists. After a series of charged skirmishes with Germain Louvet, tension culminates in the legendary Flying Kiss. As O’Neill wraps her arms around Louvet’s neck and they lock their mouths together, the centrifugal force of their spinning bodies lifts her completely off the ground, producing one of the most iconic images in contemporary dance. Clad in simple white nightgowns, their movements turn fluid and breathless, and their embrace becomes the physical manifestation of a connection that has finally transcended normative order and codified behaviour.