A few minutes into Geographers of Solitude, Debussy’s Clair de lune is heard ever so faintly – as if played offstage, elsewhere.

Gradually, the volume increases as the source of the music seems to move closer, like an auditory memory coming into focus. On stage, 20 dancers, comprising ŻfinMalta’s members alongside those of Ballet d’Jèrri, the national dance company of Jersey Island, engage, with an air of ease, in subtle yet intricate choreography. It is a moment tinged with gentle expression, simultaneously unsettling.

Clair de lune, completed by Debussy in 1905, has been, over the years, relentlessly employed as a dramatising tool in film, television and theatre.

Geographers of Solitude unapologetically layers Clair de lune with its own romantic aspirations – as, while it plays, dancers walk, one by one, to a standing microphone and, in spoken word, list artefacts belonging to past lives, unearthed over the years by researchers across a series of geographical coordinates – quartz, toy parts, a broken compass that only points north, fragments of writing – an inventory of endless sentimentality.

For Paolo Mangiola, the choreographer and director of Geographers of Solitude, the choice to incorporate the world’s most overused piano piece into this moment brings with it the risk of various possible pitfalls – a dampening of emotion, a flattening of meaning, clichédness, exhaustion. The stakes are high, and yet Mangiola’s vision seems to overcome their urgency.

For Mangiola, Clair de lune serves as an elegiac melody evoking human memory – or does it? After all, Verlaine’s poem, from which Debussy’s Clair de lune borrows its name, references ‘bergamasks’ in its opening line – a bergamask being a type of dance associated with clowns and buffoonery.

Is Mangiola telling us that if we really wanted to contend with loss and devastation, there needs to be a shift in certain melodies and stories that, like Debussy’s, have been played over and over – a certain something that makes a buffoonery out of human exceptionalism?

“For this work, I wanted to undertake this exploration of the human condition through non-human eyes, in the flight of the Arctic Tern, from the north to south poles and back, touching down in five places – the arctic circle, the islands of Jersey and Malta, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Antarctica,” Magniola explains in the performance programme notes.

By tracing the route of the migrating bird, Mangiola seems to somehow come to a terribly gorgeous realisation: humans cannot and are not to remain a single reference point in artistic expression. Indeed, from the Clair de lune moment onwards, a strangely clinical quality seems to permeate the rest of Geographers of Solitude.

In this light, the combination of Mangiola’s sentiment and Debussy’s composition becomes a point of contention. Not because it is not stunning – stunning it is indeed – but because, even triggered by the perfect melancholy of Debussy, the dance speaks of the end of humanity as we know it. And, more significantly, because the dance is intent on making us realise that it would not have it any other way. Here, we find ourselves, Mangiola tells us, at the uncanny intersection of art and reality.

This should not come as a surprise to any of us who have followed Mangiola’s oeuvre as ŻfinMalta’s artistic director for the past seven years. Mangiola has created some of his most fervent pieces with the aim of erasing the lines between the human and the non-human, each production advancing upon the last.

His concept of choreography is dance that, regardless of its subject, always serves a purpose beyond itself, always finds itself challenging the boundaries between a dancer’s body and its surroundings. Geographies of Solitude takes this impetus and runs with it. 

In its opening sequence, Geographers of Solitude projects video onto walls erected downstage. The initial shot is an aerial view of Valletta, imbued with expressionist, otherworldly hues, featuring a peculiar purple sky, followed by a zooming in on the Manoel Theatre building in an unbroken take.

This seamless gaze crosses the threshold of an open door on the rooftop and navigates the building’s interior until it reaches the stage.

The dance begins when two dancers enter the stage – emerging from side parterre seats – and haul themselves over the walls, disappearing behind them. These walls, forming part of the modular set by Gary Pace, are then shifted to unveil the depth of the stage.

Bathed by the glow of Dali Aguerbi’s atmospheric lighting, the entire ensemble executes a choreography marked with a certain buoyancy and spontaneity, a swirling yet forward-moving momentum.

It encourages us to closely examine the narratives that endure during times of collapse and catastrophe, to envision alternative divisions, roleplay, ecologies

For now, the dancers never touch, as they appear to avoid acknowledging one another’s presence, as if privy to secrets they cannot share.

The original score, composed by Dag Rosenqvist and characterised by synth elements, offers shimmering melodic waves that complement Mangioli’s sharp movements in unexpected ways – elongations and compressions executed in varied rhythms, oscillating between counterpoint and synchronicity, shifting in force: from assertive gestures to gentle ones.

Throughout, while engaging in spoken word, dancers list geographical coordinates, found artefacts, facts about ecological devastation, articulating poetry and song in English, Maltese and French. Via the accumulation of detail conveyed through words, we come to terms with further dramatic meaning.

Both ŻfinMalta’s and Ballet d’Jerri’s members exhibit equal prowess in both dancing and acting. Under the dramaturgical guidance of Victor Jacono, the energy they channel while muscling through choreography is mirrored in the expressiveness of their faces, sustained throughout the performance. Occasionally, they fix their gaze upon the audience, to a hypnotic effect.

As the performance progresses, the dancers devote significant time to using the walls on stage as props: moving them around, dismantling them, laying them flat on the stage floor and propping them back up.

The task feels Sisyphean: dancers caught in a loop of repurposing elements of theatre. When, in the second act, a sharp blue light fills the stage and floods onto the audience, it feels like a sign of hope.

In the first act, the costumes created by Alessandro Vigilante, Holly Knowles and Linda Rowell as stylist and costumier, hung loosely from the bodies; now, in this second act, they fit tightly – leotards, in shiny reds and blues that merge into the lighting.

But as the dancers move, to an elastic effect, accompanied by a soundscape composed of whale calls, we come to realise that the blue light is not chromatically symbolic; it is, indeed, more literal – we are under water. Whereas, earlier in the opening video, the sky appeared purple, the blue, here, prosaically defines the thalassic realm.

This is not the only instance where Geographers of Solitude overtly spells out an underlying theme. At various moments throughout the performance, dancers travel dangerously downstage, a little too close to the edge. Bodies figuratively inhabit liminal spaces by literally teetering and wavering on the demarcation between theatre and audience.

As the performance comes to a close, we witness the entire ensemble move intently forward, only to be propelled back into the stage’s depths by the intertwined arms of a pair of dancers. At this point, resistance seems to make way for tenderness, as dancers embrace each other – a unwittingly human communal moment in the face of an important yet forever elusive non-human vision.

In the performance’s final moments, the climbing-over-the-wall gesture returns – an edge which, this time, all dancers traverse, as they help each other climb and jump over the walls.

The whole ordeal turns eerie as the 1964 song Come Wander With Me is played. Sung by actress Bonnie Beecher, the song featured in and also borrowed its name from the final episode of the American television series The Twilight Zone.

To this song, the video sequence of the beginning is repeated in reverse, moving from inside the theatre to outside, eventually zooming out and ascending into the sky. Like the reminiscence of loss, motifs persist, played backwards. This feels like Mangiola’s final statement to his dance company and to Malta, marking his last production as creative director.

The geography of solitude appears to be, here, firmly lodged amid something different – perhaps, a farewell letter of sorts. The final effect is a complex blend of longing and weirdness, lyrical yet never pompous, just like the artistic vision itself that has propelled Mangiola’s journey within ŻfinMalta until now.

In this sense, the concluding segment of Geographers of Solitude feels like a hauntingly magnificent albeit all-too-human ending to a broader and longer road taken.