La Veronal, Pasionaria, Sadler's Wells

La Veronal is led by Barcelona-born choreographer Marcos Morau, whose concept of dance owes a lot to his interest in film, theatre and human psychology. The company was last seen at Sadler's Wells in 2015 with Voronia, a work set in a claustrophobic underworld inspired by the deepest cave in the world, the two kilometres deep Krubera Voronia in the western Caucasus. The Observer described Voronia thus: 'if moral reasoning, virtuoso dance and dark-wave atmospherics are your thing, it’s a bracingly rewarding evening.'

Now La Veronal returns to Sadler's Wells with Pasionaria, which premiered in Spain four years ago. Like Voronia and other Morau shows, Pasionaria, too, is a place: a big room dominated by a staircase that leads we don't know where and a very large window through which we can see the firmament.

In this ambiguous space eight dancers move as if entirely deprived of humanity, resembling nothing so much as robots, or, as one Spanish critic put it, 'bodies with no souls'. As they move seemingly to no particular purpose, Pasionaria questions the increasingly artificial world we live in, which is pushing us towards a state of emotional detachment.

The mood is strange and disquieting and it's not always easy to follow what's going on. There is, nonetheless, a kind of narrative coherence that keeps us fixated on the performance evolving before our eyes.

Reviewing the show, the Diario de Sevilla praised Pasionaria's 'fantastic composition of images, made up of light and shade' alongside its many references to cinema and visual arts, as well the 'truly impressive performance of La Veronal's eight dancers.'

Pasionaria was choreographed by Morau in collaboration with the dancers and is set to a score by Juan Cristóbal Saavedra, which assembles classical music and contemporary pieces, and – be warned! – is loud.