Three women and a man enter the stage, hand in hand, in couples. They walk past the audience, who are sitting in a circle, carefully looking at everyone’s faces before getting to their places: two women, who we guess are the musicians, behind the audience; the other two, the dancers, next to the audience inside the circle, facing each other. 

Another male-female couple will soon inhabit the centre of the stage. Dressed in black, like the others, they are linked by one long sleeve of their jackets. They can’t get away from each other, though they keep trying. They start moving in a circle – the shape that will accompany the whole performance: dancing around one another, spinning together, inviting the other dancers in a bigger circle or trying to form other couples.

There’s a lot of struggling and heavy breathing, fighting and finding harmony in Danse staur, Danse staur, by the company Kartellet, a piece inspired by a traditional dance practice called ‘dancing stag’ or ‘to stag’, where men danced with men, and women with women. It’s the first time Kartellet have involved female performers, and they challenge themselves to not install either the norm of opposite-gender couples or the tradition of same-gender couples, and instead to choose to be playful with audience expectations. The leading role in couple is often exchanged; the longing for the two women (or the two men) to dance with each other is often disrupted by the urge of an excluded dancer to bring them back to the original couples. Mastering a specific technique for turning, each dancer competes to be the fastest, to find new virtuosities, to catch the attention of another partner, to be noisy and bold, rewriting the rules of what seems to be a courtship in times of fluidity.

In the playfulness of breathtaking dance, the game of love is painful and relieving, freeing or imprisoning. Just as with couples dancing in jackets with a shared sleeve, it all depends on how one can embrace the struggle and transform it into a creative act.