Tick tock, tick tock . . . it goes on, and on, the clock sound, first the ticking, then a cuckoo clock chime—maddeningly, as if mocking everyone with ideas of the march to mortality. The clock is the jumping off point for Sweden-based choreographer Emilie Leriche’s “Rotten Work,” also unveiled for the first time tonight. The ensemble emulates clock hands with arms extended, working together with precision like factory workers. They are cogs in the machine, the worker ants. They jerk heads and arms in unison, then bunny hop around the floor. There's a folk flavour to some of the choreography, like Eastern European footwork. Elsewhere, it draws from more modern sources like hip hop dancing.

This is dance as contagion, as each dancer copies the other. It's the liminal space between viral dance as on social media, or virus as something we catch in real life. Leriche is exploring ideas around working to live versus living to work, asking wider questions about coming together for the collective good. Squint and some of the baggy earth coloured clothing could be sackcloth. But zoom in further and the clothing is marked with rectangular black shapes, creating a futuristic nuance to the costumes. 

Suddenly the playfulness abates, and the mood takes a darker turn. Now, the dance vocabulary is more akin to a Saint Vitus Dance, a mad, thrashing movement. Bodies which were calm and regulated become manic and wild, no longer part of the uniformity of the working day. 

The arrival halfway through the piece of Kassichana Okene-Jameson and Pauline Torzuoli reinforces the idea of dissent in the ranks. By performing more fluid work with graceful extensions, the pair's bid for a new way of living is introduced to the piece. 

Now freed from the old restrictive ways of working in collaboration, the company of worker ants is now exploring, evolving, doing their own instinctive movement. The sense of gentle anarchy permeates throughout, and Wolff Bergen's music, so capricious and complex, delightfully glitches and scratches,  trickling out all the way through the auditorium, creating a fantastic wall of sound. 

We are indeed blessed to have the endlessly brilliant, innovative company—this double bill demonstrates their shape shifting quality.