A man encased in a white protective suit comes out carrying a notebook, but he is not a scientist or lab technician, he is a dancer. As the music begins, a heart-rending Russian love song, he takes out a vacuum cleaner with an almost impossibly long blood red hose, and begins to vacuum the stage. Loudly. It’s a funny moment, with a strong visual presence generating associations that shoot out like vectors in different directions – the conflict between art and science, references to the Cold War and nuclear arms race, a comic commentary on science and technology. It’s all this and more.

Once the vacuuming is done, the music stops too and the guy walks over to the elevator at the rear of the stage, presses the button – and Particle Accelerator, Yoram Karmi’s new work really goes into motion, living up to its name with an amazing high-energy performance by the Fresco Dance Company.

In contemporary culture, almost everyone has at least a rudimentary notion of what a particle accelerator does (very rudimentary: it makes subatomic particles move really fast) – and that is, at least in part, the concept behind the dance – the influence of science and technology on every aspect of life. At times the work itself is like a particle accelerator, in which the dancers move, collide and are transformed by the interaction. The precision, beauty, power and velocity of the company’s ensemble work are breath-taking, with the duets and solos revealing the expressive depth that takes this work beyond any simple summation.

The metaphor of the particle accelerator is reflected in the movement,  The story of particle accelerator is in the details of the relationships between the dancers onstage, the relationships between their bodies and the space. There are sudden sharp transitions in style which reflect different physical states. Touch, like a collision, can create change within the dance.

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