It began in a beer-stained rock club in St Petersburg six years ago: whatever conversations took place in the small hours between the members of the German company, Fabrik and the Russian dance company, Do-Theatre, they haven't parted company since. Fabrik's performing base in Potsdam is now home to both companies of "free movers", who've managed to create new work together without any (serious) artistic tiffs. Their co-production, Hopeless Games, seen last week at the Dublin Fringe Festival and now Belfast bound, is typical of their collaborative approach. A Fringe First-winner at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, it has touched audiences and critics alike.
Fusing different dance and theatrical forms, this evocative, wordless, one-hour piece is shot through with black humour and lyricism. In a derelict train station with deserted, windswept platforms, a group of vagrants - or phantoms? - clutching battered suitcases briefly come together, before their pathways part forever.
Outcasts, survivors or refugees, the five Godot-esque figures in bowler hats and fedoras dance and play, one moment playing a clownish version of Russian roulette, then swirling, rolling and twisting in unison, their shirts and coat-tails flapping. Trains thunder across the video screen behind them, and children's songs and cries accompany the plaintive soundtrack. Inevitably, the Holocaust and post-war transit camps come to mind.
"People have their own very personal or political reactions to it," says Wolfgang Hoffmann, a founder member of Fabrik and one of the five dancers in Hopeless Games. "They see all sorts of themes in it - Kosovo, torture chambers - but it's not specific, it has a universal quality. For DoTheatre, it is the third part of a trilogy on the theme of fallen angels - a very Russian idea. It evokes lost souls, journeys through life, our longing for remote places, the promise of what's to come . . ."
The journey into death? "Yes, absolutely."
Hoffmann seems slightly bemused by the ecstatic reaction to Hopeless Games in Britain. "In Germany, people thought, yes, nice piece, but in the English speaking world, the response has been much stronger. Because it's non-verbal, it reaches their emotions directly. I think the style [which combines physical intensity, black humour and humorous grotesque] touches people who don't have the cultural background to produce this kind of work themselves. To me it is very East European."
Although it proves difficult to define, the creation of this "Eastern European mood" is very important to Hoffmann. "I mean that links happen in the work that aren't logical. The influence of Russian art is there.
"Since our early days, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we in Fabrik have been nurturing our East German roots. We are conscious of belonging to a country that doesn't exist any more. We looked to Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic states, and, of course, to Russia for influences."
The dance work that Do-Theatre was making in St Petersburg under artistic director Jewgenij Koslov was very extreme and intense - "a Russian Butoh style", Hoffmann calls it. "Semi-naked, the dancers would fling and batter their bodies against floors and hard cold surfaces, or they would hang upside down by their feet."
The impetus behind this almost masochistic exploration of pain was, he says, "a physical search to go beyond limits, to put the human body in perspective to nature, showing how fragile and vulnerable it is."
Since joining forces with Fabrik, the members of Do-Theatre seem to have softened up a bit. "Fabrik has injected a bit of humour and lightness," Hoffmann grins, "we think."
"I don't like to call our work physical theatre, that's become a kind of brand name and it often includes some very sloppy work. I prefer the terms `visual' or `picture theatre'. In Germany we perform mainly on the dance circuit but what really interests me is theatre language that uses the body.
"People need to trust in a sensual rather than intellectual understanding of theatre. Instead of being told what a piece is `about' and given texts and programmes, audiences will be invited to be mature enough to look and think for themselves. Depending on the degree of openness they bring to it, they will be carried along, moved forward into a new understanding. This is the future of theatre." His eyes gleam at the prospect.
Hopeless Games is at The Summit, Belfast, from Wednesday October 25th to Saturday 28th, 8 p.m. Today it is in Cork at the Firkin Crane Arts Centre (021-507487); it moves to the Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick on Monday October 23rd, (061 319709) and then to Factory Performance Space, Sligo on Thursday (071 70431)
