Choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion have developed their own genre: neither music nor dance, it might best be called simply “composition”. Its clearest trait is not its potpourri of sound, text, gesture and action, nor its matter-of-fact execution, but its structure.
That makes it sound predictable; in fact, their double acts fizz with serendipity and surprise. In One Flute Note, Fargion walks to an assigned spot. “One flute note,” he intones. Burrows echoes him from offstage. We hear a single flute note. These, pretty much, become the elements of a structure they elaborate in several directions. There is number: if one note, how about two, five, 45? Timbre: if flute, why not bells, a choir, trumpets? Sequence: if it goes walk, talk, echo, sound, why not sound, talk, walk, echo? The outcome is always peculiar, sometimes funny; but what weirds you out is that it’s both perfectly clear and utterly brain-scrambling. From method, it seems, comes madness.
It’s a difficult piece to relate to, though: a world unto itself, with maybe too much information to process. Body Not Fit for Purpose is no less thoughtful or crackpot, but much more engaging. Seated at a table, the pair perform short numbers with arbitrary titles such as The War on Drugs, Vladimir Putin and The Desire to Be Black, or White. In each, Fargion plays a folksome ditty on his mandolin while Burrows does a low-key, highly articulated gestural dance.
You’ll struggle to make any connection to the titles (how, you might infer, could music or dance live up to such topics anyway?), but dance and ditty are exactly timed to each other, and delightfully done. My favourites were Respect the Poor, a plaintive little melody to which Burrows gyrates and shivers sweetly, and Bankers, where he might almost be a bonkers abacus operator. Every number, they tell us, derives from an old European melody, La Folia. That seems apt: from madness comes their method.
• Until 3 February. Box office: 0844 412 4300. Venue: Sadlers Wells, London.
