The first full length piece by Catalan / British duo Humanhood, Zero was created in 2016 and throttles through five turbulent years to land still spinning. It’s a startling work (perhaps even more so now) that foreshadows the company’s accomplished Torus (2019) and the forthcoming Infinity, a piece for eight dancers that comes to Barcelona this April. 

Based in Birmingham and Barcelona, co-creators Julia Robert and Rudi Cole work with a symbiosis of physics, movement, sound, lighting, costume and music. “Zero is propelled by any one of its parts” says Robert, who adds the desire was to create a duet that did not adhere to the familiar gendered relationship between dancers, approaching each instead as a seperate entity, an agent in and a part of the whole. 

Created over a year and a half, Zero developed out of conversations with David Jou, professor of thermodynamics at Barcelona University, whose discipline studies the relationship between heat, work, temperature, and energy; and with William Chaplin, professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham, pioneer in award-winning work on exoplanets and stellar vibrations – the sounds that stars make – captured with telescopes through a technique called asteroseismology. 

Each dance production has its own energy, says Cole, and for Zero they spent four months in India learning Moving Breath, a technique developed by Sheela Raj, which uses breath, space and movement as ‘a motor of continuous regeneration’. The production features a soundtrack co-created by Icelandic musician Gyda Valtysdottir, British producer Alex Forster and Pakistani multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, melded by Scottish sound designer Iain Armstrong into a compelling compulsive-immersive soundscape. Sublime and unsettling; a grinding inevitability urges us on: the ash-schemed set an evocation of Birmingham’s industrial past and our environmentally-devastated shared future.