There is a beguiling playfulness to this experimental dance piece from choreographer Karl Jay-Lewin and composer Matteo Fargion. If I Can’t Dance I’m Not Coming is a take on Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, but each iteration of the piece as it tours is performed by a new cast, with each of the eight members directing one segment (or act). The movement unfolds in conversation with Fargion’s elegant, teasing ‘String Quartet No 5’, rich in pizzicato passages that mirror the dancers’ jagged fingers and angular arms which also echo the modernist angles and perspectives of the source film.

The fact that the dancers are dressed in a range of everyday casual 21st-century clothes offers up an extra layer of strangeness. It’s like seeing a story boiled down to plain decontextualised gestures, to the barest building blocks of communication, like the way cubist painters separated three-dimensional faces into two-dimensional planes. Facial expressions are contorted into exaggerations of pleading, appealing, thinking and fear. Dancers appear onstage, perform their action (a swing of the arm, an imaginary embrace) and revert to normal as they depart. It’s quirky and fascinating, and strangely compelling. Jay-Lewin has said he was seeking ‘dignity’ over ‘virtuosity’, and to this end the ensemble can feel a little messy or raw at times. But the questing curiosity of the piece and a wry awareness of its own absurdity stop it from falling into self-indulgence. 

If I Can’t Dance I’m Not Coming, Assembly Dance Base, until 27 August, 2.40pm; picture: Brian Hartley.