Choreographer Tim Rushton’s international dancers were selected for their “physical intelligence and talking bodies”.

Every touch led to a shifting and reforming: rather than holding poses, the performers continued exploring the space around them. One woman, carried above her partner in a dramatic shaft of light, continued to reach out with tentatively twitching fingertips and flexing toes, turning her searching gaze across the stage.

During Enigma, Mathias Friis-Hansen’s music broke down to static pops and crackles, as if echoing an old recording, mixed with scrunching noises as if voicing the movements of the dancers’ joints and spines as they leapt and bounced like boxers, and rolled across the floor like children. The soundtrack shifted to muted chimes and metallic rustling milk bottle tops to accompany a couple under dappled light, surging and rising as if swept by tides along a seabed.

CaDance was a tense and nervy challenge for the five male dancers, with an underlying air of violence. They flexed their fingers at hip height as if preparing to form fists, and stretched backwards, contorted as if under torture. Two percussionists beating drum kits heightened the compelling yet uneasy atmosphere.

Kridt told stories from the life of an old man (Luca Marazia) at the point of death. Blackboards covered the back wall, and while the dancers crossed the stage, Biblical verses were scrawled across, then spoken in Portuguese. Partly wiped out and overlaid with coloured lines and shadows, the background perfectly supported the moving performance, which was cheered by the rapt audience.