Daina Ashbee’s J’ai pleuré avec les chiens (‘I cried with the dogs’) begins with the six performers crawling on all fours in a stylised and disciplined manner across the performance area, surrounded on all four sides by the audience’s chairs. Rhythmically tracing geometrical patterns on the floor creates a clean postmodern-tuned opening – but the effect proves entirely deceptive. The performers calmly take off their clothes, and proceed to different tasks that combine bodily actions – uncomfortably resisting in a balance on the floor over one knee, or carrying out quite demanding yoga asanas alone or in couples – accompanied by heavy breathing, intense barking and, finally, releasing howling sounds.

Basic materials lead into complex contents, like the fully exposed vaginas à la Florentina Holzinger when a physical practice is done naked, or unboundedly trembling flesh sculpted by the intense muscular effort when releasing a profound inner visceral voice. The performers address the audience close up, gazing into our eyes or performing actions directed shamelessly towards us, but also through a (somehow alienating) recorded speech by a person calling herself a ‘metaphysical healer’. The air becomes dense as these slightly grotesque figures begin to carry multiple meanings, many of them suggesting a connection to our personal bodily archive.

We react in extremely different ways: turning away, covering our bodies, laughing, even shedding tears. In this somehow chaotic mass, I find myself engaged in an intense ritual, encouraging the performers to complete the exorcism led by performer Greys Vecchionacce as a shaman in a powerful sonic and physical ecstasy. I exit in an unsettlingly purified bodily state in which Mary Wigman’s ecstatic dances seem to have fused with 60s and 70s feminist art.