In 1902, the floor of a new housing development in Paola caves in, revealing an underground structure carved in the soft rock below. The archaeological excavations on site in the years that follow lead to the discovery of the Ħal-Saflieni Hypogeum, with its corridors and caves piled with dust, human bones, pottery and slabs of stone.

In their midst is a clay figurine depicting a woman naked from the waist upwards, lying on her side on a couch that seems to be sagging under her weight. Her origins are found to date back to the Neolithic period; she comes to be known as Malta’s ‘Sleeping Lady’.

The story of Georgia Tegou’s Ochre – the first piece of ŻfinMalta’s double bill performance, titled ŻfinDays – takes off from the instant the prehistoric woman is awakened from the thousands of years of her subterranean slumber.

For the first few minutes, we witness a male dancer coax what we are to understand is the Sleeping Lady out of the box-like structure she is tucked in. But the intimacy of that moment is soon cast off; more dancers enter the scene and, from then onwards, the stage finds itself becoming a place of revelation, sexuality and ferity, marked by the dancers’ movements – at times lyrical, at others brutal.

Tegou’s choreography suggests a locus where history converges with femininity, which is also to say a kind of nowhereland – all of which unfolds in a stark white setting, designed by Andrew Borg Wirth, a shrine of the purest of light, cold and vast.

In exploring the juncture between dance and the female body through the motif of Malta’s divine feminine, Ochre manages to place the performative at its centre without isolating itself from gender politics, historical circumstances and the constraints and conventions of representation.

Tracing the existence of the goddess figure to prehistoric civilisations, studies of genesis myths have speculated the belief that goddesses, imagined in their forms as women with fertile bodies, capable of creating new life, played a central role in the origins of the world.

In her capacity as one of the classical reiterations of such a figure, Venus, typically known as the Roman goddess of love and beauty, has been imagined, across her historical lineage, as young and supremely alluring to a significantly consistent extent; an incarnation of beauty par excellence, informing a range of issues that turned out to be operative in the history of European art.

 In Ochre, goddess and Sleeping Lady become one to form a Maltese Venus. Here, she seems girlish, mortal even. What the dance provides, in this respect, is the possibility for a female deity to be identified with corporeal manifestation – a miraculous coming to life as an act of a choreographer’s intervention. Overall, the thematic aura of the entire piece seems to hinge on whether or not the divine can be imagined as organic unity.

A choreography like this risks pitting the nuance and depth of ancient religion against the relative flatness of Venus’s status as an archaeological sign and artefact; but that is never the case for Tegou. On this stage, Tegou tells us, the choreography’s recuperative treatment of the authority of mythology contains the potential to widen the repertoire of tropes and rethink the relationship between beauty, truth and embodiment.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Is not the goddess, after all, a part of the discussion surrounding the interrelations between the organic and the inorganic, nature and artifice, immanence and transcendence, among countless others – that very same stuff that suffuses theatre? What is Malta’s Sleeping Lady, if not a body that has moved from one site to another, from one instance to the next; what is she, if not choreography?

At the end of Ochre, the goddess sleeps again. There is a casual sense of protest to it. In a world where too much revolves around the inevitability of disturbance, sleep is revolutionary. This goddess’s commitment to sleep is a marker not of passivity but of self-awareness, of perseverance.

“How long is one minute? What are the limits of the body?”, How to Destroy Your Dance, the piece that follows in the double bill, asks in the programme. Choreographed by Francesca Pennini, this second part of ŻfinDays presents a game-like scenario, where we see the dancers participate in a series of challenges against the limits of time.

Of course, a choreographer’s obsession with time is indubitably bromidic; but it is bromidic in a manner that any issue that is bound to remain unresolved is, to be sentimentally pondered upon over and over by nature and necessity.

The whimsicality and deliberate, over-the-top stylisation of Pennini’s choreography is interesting insofar as it sharply contrasts with the mystical undertones of Tegou’s Ochre; however, despite the fact that the two pieces cannot seem more distinct, one gets the sense that the fundamental things apply to both, that both are concerned with the same uncertain future.

A dancer from ‘Ochre’ by Georgia Tegou.

Like the unearthing of a goddess, the destruction of a dance offers the opportunity for credence in the multiple possibilities of how to tell a story, of where origins lie and what is being presaged; it evokes a timeline that is fragmented. Only through piece-by-piece discovery, can the world become knowable to us, ŻfinMalta suggests.

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”, W.B. Yeats asks in his poem Among School Children. For Pennini, the two things cannot be more different; it is the dancer that cannot keep up with the dance.

Her choreography’s movements are often frantic, indistinct and unclean; timing in dance remains within the parameters of her own understanding of bodies, a personal perspective she  wishes to universalise. The ‘how-to’ in the title of her piece is deceptive – this dance has anything but clear-cut instructions to offer.

 The dance is destroyed, but the dance itself repairs. Once the choreographies of women take centre stage, countless bodies break away from the forms that they have been made to occupy, immobile and in states of slumber, for far too long.

Is the dancing goddess favoured with the power to choose whether or not to remain still? How would we view the relationship between time and movement had women been allowed to speak about bodies as much as men?

Such preoccupations are not only interesting to address but also urgent insofar as questions around the intimacies of theatre more broadly – in which it no longer remains possible to tell where the body ends and everything else begins – persist; questions which, it seems (for the time being at least), are here to stay.