DANCE from Belgium occupies a prime position on the performing arts programme during the first two weeks of the Belfast Festival. Next week it comes prettily packaged in the frothy tutus and sparkly jewels of the Royal Ballet of Flanders's Cinderella.
This week, however, incomplete, dramatic and stark contrast, one of Europe's leading contemporary dance companies, Ultima Vez, with scant consideration for tender sensibilities, chucks into our consciousness Wim Vandekeybus's landmark, award-winning creation What the Body Does Not Remember.
An astonishing nine years after it was premiered in Haarlem, this hugely-physical 75-minute dance explosion still packs a punch that shocks, "thrills and leaves its audience breathless and wondering.
Out of a dizzying succession of ostensibly haphazard movements and a peculiar assortment of prosaic everyday objects - chairs, jackets, towels, feathers and concrete blocks placed, carried, flung every which way - this strong, athletic young company creates a rhythm and a charge which perfectly blend with Thierry De Mey and Peter Verineersch's pulsing electronic score.
And in amongst the power dancing, there are welcome chinks of wry humour to lighten a performance that could, in less competent bodies, go quite horribly wrong.
Such a rough, dangerous, confrontational, sexy piece demands of its dancers total trust, total confidence, total discipline, total freedom as here.
