Two women arrive on stage, slickly dressed in engineered slacks and tops the colours and coolness of cassata ice-cream, smooth and tasteful. They begin a gestural Q&A: body ripples, hand thrusts, enquiring head tilts, responding to each other with complicit smiles. We hear steps from the auditorium and a third performer saunters over to the silver cymbals hanging from the flies. He sets them quivering. 

Mirte Bogaert intends to have our senses sharpen to all that makes up a performance: music and lighting, as much as the dancers and their movements. In REtransLATE she is also fascinated by the ‘relation between language and body, translation and reaching new understandings though misunderstandings’: a non-verbal Chinese whispers?

Once the cymbals have ceased shimmering and the player has moved to his console at the side of the stage, chiming, scraping, scratching and plucking sounds begin to drench the air. A fourth performer, a man, extends the danced dialogue with back arches, arm swings and off-centre torso tips. Through their exchange of glances and the echoing of each other’s gestures, the three dancers appear to be sharing truths or revelations; but it’s their precision rhythm and the musicality of movement that keeps us, the audience, rapt in the conversation.

After a crescendo: a pulsating house-dance trance, a sole performer reappears carrying a sheet of mirrored metal. By stealthy lighting, she creates a projection, an ever-transforming ectoplasmic shape that she directs across the white backdrop. It’s a pause, a breather, an aesthetic interlude that serves to accentuate the feeling that flesh-and-blood bodies in motion need no translation. The pleasure is in entering the pattern without having to understand the plot.