Figures in white coats wearing masks over their mouths, observing and conducting tests on other people. Between them stand glass cages suggestive of gigantic test tubes. 生长genesis, as the title suggests, is a show about the origins of things. We are born and then we die, and in the meantime we undergo constant testing and increasing estrangement from the natural world.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, working with the Chinese dance star Yabin Wang – remember her spectacular dancing between the drums in the Echo Game sequence of the film “House of Flying Daggers” – explores our origins and our destination. To use his own words, “It is about growth, whether global, personal or artistic”. To the sounds of live music with roots in Africa, India, Japan, China and Poland he translates philosophical ideas about life, the pressures imposed on us by our society to perform and conform, into beautiful sequences of movement in which East and West, life and death, come together.