KAGE Physical Theatre – powerhouse creative couple Kate Denborough and Gerard Van Dyck – celebrates its 20th anniversary this year with a season of their 2013 work Flesh and Bone, in an intimate venue with music performed live by the Sydney Art Quartet.

The Yellow House, once a legendary counter-culture arts hub, is now a very proper white cube gallery, the deep colours of the entrance the merest nod to its psychedelic past. The clientele, too, has moved up market, and a well-heeled and elegant crowd settle in a few rows of temporary seating for this salon performance.

^{Gerard Van Dyck and Kate Denborough of KAGE. Photograph © Lachlan Woods}

Before us to one side stands a table with a white cloth, strewn with plates, champagne glasses, lemons and napkins. Sheet music is scattered across the floor. On the other side of the performance area, a dinghy sits beached against a pile of rocks, draped with lifejackets, more music, and assorted paraphernalia.

Denborough and Van Dyck enter, dressed in black, each carrying a musician fireman-style. The musicians are inanimate, somnolent, dressed by Prada in formal black, but barefoot. Denborough and Van Dyck lower...