Raising eyebrows has multiple meanings in Greenlandic, also known as the Inuit language Kalaallisut. The dancer and founder of Aviaja Dance company, Sarah Aviaja Hammeken, is a mix of Danish and Greenlandic heritage and wants to explore identity, language and belonging in this 45-minute performance. Her show crackles into life slowly from a dark room; electronic buzzes seem to be gradually waking a cyborg being, coiled on the ground in a pile of dark black soil. Her limbs spasm in robotic pulses, building into a more human flow of movement. 

An English voiceover steps in as Hammeken walks to a chair and slips into a very Copenhagen-coded outfit of understated, but considered, cream cotton, her knees and shins still caked in soil. Soil holds our roots, we hear, followed by a short timeline of Hammeken’s relationship with language. First Danish at home, then English at school, Swedish when she travelled to dance school and German for work. 

Although Danish is often unflatteringly described as sounding like the person has ‘a potato in their mouth’, it felt more hurtful and loaded when Hammeken was mocked for her Greenlandic heritage. Dance is one of her languages now, of course, and every micro expression of Hammeken’s face is used here to add nuance, fine tuning an emotion as it evolves. Her expansive, fluid and sometimes tense choreography gets across the frustration and beauty of communication, particularly in a culture that she identifies with, even when she’s still struggling to learn the right words. 

Soil, Assembly Dance Base, until Sunday 17 August, 3.50pm; main picture: Amalie Ivalo Hammeken.