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Springback Academy is a mentored programme for upcoming dance writers at Aerowaves’ Spring Forward festival. These texts are the outcome of those workshops.

BEAT ‘I just wish to feel you’ – Jenna Jalonen / Jonas Garrido Verweft

Two performers dancing energetically on stage.

Jenna Jalonen /Collective Dope: BEAT. Photo © Daniel Domolky

Even watching in rather indistinct VR – as we are now, seated in a circle and peering into our headsets – Jenna Jalonen and Jonas Garrido Verweft feel fierce and physical. Accompanied by Adrian Newgent mixing sound and, somewhat disorientingly, a second virtual audience in the round, they hurl, splat, launch, thrash and flail at each other, constantly flipping between two extremes: charged vitality and reflex reaction on the one hand, the dead weight of limp limbs and corpsed torsos on the other. Is this a battle between life and death? Not figuratively, but maybe dynamically.

Exhausted, the dancers flake out on the floor, microphones amplifying the heave and rasp of their breath. From then on, their connection becomes less embattled, more co-operative, even tender, as the performance fades, like life itself, towards darkness.

It’s a forceful, piece; imagine it in real life.

Sanjoy Roy