The first piece, “Then or Now,” is directed and choreographed by William Tuckett, and performed to both a ‘spoken score’ composed of poetry by Adrienne Rich (in collaboration with Director of Poetry, Fiona L. Bennett) and a sparse yet rich composition for violin by Daniel Pioro, which takes its lead from Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Passacaglia. It’s an abundance of ideas, themes, art forms & textures which explode out from the Edinburgh Festival Theatre stage. 

We open on the stage dotted with white chairs and towering industrial lamps, while the dancers are dressed humbly in light & dark greys of delicate fabric. There’s a sense of a jury, or some sort of shared space—here will be a hearing, a reckoning. The piece was originally created in 2020, which meant its original performance lifespan was truncated. Tuckett writes that he wanted to create something that spoke to the times we live in, a time of felt weightiness and responsibility.  

Within the wealth of Rich’s poetry and the beautiful piercing violin, Tuckett’s choreography holds its own nuance. There’s a softness and ease through the dancers’ whole bodies, recurring bends in the elbows and whispering feet, while they move through defined classical shapes. There’s ingenuity in how Tuckett capitalises on turns and momentum within partner lifts, so that the lifts never appear strained and are indeed often surprising in how they appear out of thin air.

“Then or Now” is strongest when busiest—when complicated, almost incidental group patterns emerge, intricate reorganisations of time, space and relationships, the dancers darting into then spiralling out of these brief vignettes. Sometimes the dance hooks onto the heft of the words, sometimes it sits at a cross-section. It’s a busy piece to process; the dancers perform it with depth of feeling.