How much can you strip away from a dance performance and still make it count as dance? It's an issue that minimalist choreographers have been probing ever since the 1960s, and it's one that Jonathan Burrows addresses with peculiar doggedness in his latest piece, Weak Dance Strong Questions.
Made and performed in collaboration with Dutch theatre director Jan Ritsema, the feel of this show is less like dance than two middle-aged guys mooching around a garden shed. There is no music, no theatre lighting and virtually no stage - the small audience sits around on a few stacking chairs.
And the choreography itself offers no story, no discernible structure and absolutely no virtuoso gloss. As the title suggests, this is dance premised on uncertainty and on failing strength.
As Burrows and Ritsema circle round each other, every phrase they dance seems to abort before it achieves its point - as if their bodies aren't up to the task of full utterance. Knees buckle, backs slouch, ankles cave and sudden emphatic gestures waver into thin air.
Its almost impossible to know whether the piece is improvised or not, for there's no obvious development of the material and no formal linking between the two performers.
And yet for the first 20 minutes or so, this duet is oddly compelling. One of the tasks that 20th-century dance set for itself was to discover a language for charting the silent, secret fluctuations of our inner lives - the subtle sensations, the small flurries of emotion that raise our pulses or tug at our guts, but which we barely attend to, let alone speak of.
In the peculiarly intimate, questioning, middle-aged moves of Weak Dance, we feel under our skin what it's like to be inside the minds and bodies of men aged 41 and 56. It's as if the silences in a Beckett or a Pinter play were allowed to dance.
The problem for an audience, though, is that the piece delivers nothing significantly new in its final 30 minutes. Amiable and clever as these two men are, it's as if their conversation gets stuck into a groove so personal the rest of us can't follow. We're not unhappy to be present, but we're not that excited either.
Burrows and Ritsema have undertaken interesting and necessary research into the fringes of dance expression, and have shown what truths can be told when the spotlight of virtuosity is turned right down.
But they have knowingly, and I guess cheerfully, put themselves beyond most people's idea of a good night out at the theatre.
