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The project: five choreographers create new dances in response to Siobhan Davies’ 1977 solo Sphinx. A potential glitch: they’ve never actually seen Sphinx. The starting point for this year-long project (there will be 20 choreographers by the end) is not a gimmick, but typical of the ever-questioning Davies, now 75, who was one of the pioneers of contemporary dance in the UK.

Instead of showing them the dance, Davies talked to the group about her experiences making Sphinx nearly 50 years ago, and what that felt like (Davies was inhabiting her animal self in a very graceful solo, which you can see when the film is shown post-performance). Our attention is drawn to process, something often frustratingly hidden from an audience, who see just an iceberg’s tip of what goes into creating a dance and what a performer might be feeling inside their spine, their muscles, their organs, their imagination.

The evening’s most lucid piece is by Shannelle “Tali” Fergus, with a voiceover of her unedited thoughts, wondering how she can do this when as a choreographer “I make shapes and respond to sounds” but doesn’t know what shapes or sounds Davies used. Infinite possibilities are more curse than blessing.

Elsewhere, Dan Daw and Temitope Ajose riff on a list of words compiled from their chats with Davies, “walking becoming dancing” or “syncing in/syncing out”, which become a pleasingly simple, unshowy duet. On film, Andrea Buckley dances in a field while a horse nibbles the grass around her. And British-Palestinian street dancer Sasha Mahfouz Shadid, a compelling mover, plays the oud, making a descending tremolo sound like a falling bomb, covering his head for protection on impact.

They are all distinctive personal responses, each made in five days. As Fergus’s voice tells us, it’s a way of thinking about how to archive dance, what we preserve from it. She muses on all the lost dances she has made herself, possibly hundreds of choreographies for classes she teaches each week. We hear her discuss her choices for this dance, as her body shifts in line with her thoughts. Maybe she will end by just putting on some music and letting herself go. That would leave us on a high – as an audience member, I want that. She decides against it, and I find I have become emotionally involved in the process too. It’s a thoughtful, rewarding evening.