At one level, the latest piece from Co3’s artistic director Raewyn Hill could not have been made by anyone else. In the company’s productions of recent years such as Gloria (by Douglas Wright) and Architect of the Invisible, Hill has defined her oeuvre as intensely humanistic and expressive.

Hill’s gestures, bodily forms and even her costumes and staging owe much to pioneers of emotionally expressive dance such as Martha Graham (cycles of extension and contraction, or the caving in, and pushing out, of the chest), Isadora Duncan (hieratic movement performed along a single plane as if modelled on a sculpted frieze from ancient Greece or Egypt), or even Australia’s own Graeme Murphy.

Indeed, Hill’s use of artfully cut, diaphanous costumes from designer Akira Isogawa inevitably invites comparisons to Murphy’s own spectacular emotive collaborations with Isogawa such as Air and Other Invisible Forces (1999).

In the Shadow of Time amplifies these characteristics. Novelty comes from the musical choices, superbly performed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra Collective.

In the Shadow of Time. Photo © Stefan Gosatti

We start with the slowly stepping, plaintive strings of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa, answered by the distressed clanging of...