There is a moment halfway through Sleeper, showing as part of the Fringe’s Korean Season, that is so terrifying, so fraught with smothering panic and electric fear, it feels like all of the piece’s climate-anxiety themes wrought into one image. Dancer Myunghun Jung has been slowly unfurling inside a telephone box-shaped structure wrapped in plastic, while a troupe of four women dance abstract drills around him. Now as the music climaxes, the lighting strobes, and he presses his face against the plastic, floundering, suffocating, drowning. It’s unforgettable. 

There are other moments in this piece, choreographed by Kim Yumi to address climate change with both warning and hope, that are arresting, beautiful or startling too. Jung breaks free from his box and wages fiery movements in red light. The troupe of four women appear dressed in white and hand him heavy skeins of bold-coloured, knotted fabric to bear. These they will later unfurl into a pinwheel around him.

It doesn’t all quite hang together, and Yumi is stronger on theatrical images than on choreographic complexity. There’s an intensity and reverence to the dancers, making their movements feel almost ritualistic, while Jaedeok Kim’s score melds the powerful beats of Korean traditional drums with electro sounds. But the gravitas all this gives the piece does mean it shuts us out emotionally for the most part. Still, the act of making art in response to such issues helps keep them urgent and alive in the minds of audiences.

Jajack Movement: Sleeper, Assembly @ Dance Base, until 18 August, 8.30pm.