Echoes – Fall Seven Times and NÁCAR: A Double Bill of Momentum and Memory

In brief:

ŻfinMalta's latest double bill, Echoes – Fall Seven Times and NÁCAR, made for an evening of contrasting physical languages: one work reaching inward through descent, suspension and recovery; the other surging outward with a sharper, more communal energy, but haunted by memory nonetheless. Presented as part of the company's collaboration with tanzmainz, the programme demonstrated why ŻfinMalta continues to position itself as one of Europe's most adventurous contemporary dance companies.

In detail:

German muscle power was to the fore last night thanks to tanzmainz, the girls as much as the boys. They picked up the big guys as if they were rag dolls, and tossed them over their shoulders.

Fall Seven Times, created by Guy Nader and Maria Campos, is simply stunning. It opened the night with a striking sense of instability. Its title proved less a literal instruction than a choreographic principle: bodies fell, caught, folded and rose again, turning gravity into both adversary and partner.

"Fall seven times, get up eight" is a traditional Japanese proverb — Nana korobi ya oki (七転び八起き) — that means true resilience is rising one more time than you fall. The dancers therefore did not simply perform falls; they investigated what happens in the moment before impact and in the fragile aftermath of recovery. It was almost like being at the circus when those daring acrobats take to the trapeze and continuously tease us with dropping from fearless heights only to be caught by a well placed colleague. At one point a girl was flung across the stage and thankfully caught by two men, upside down with her head barely six inches above the ground. If tanzmainz's insurance broker was watching he must have had a heart attack.

The movement vocabulary was grounded and muscular, full of low travelling phrases, sudden releases and these endless carefully timed catches. There was a compelling tension between control and surrender. At times, the ensemble moved as a single breathing organism; at others, individual dancers seemed stranded in private cycles of collapse and renewal.

All of the ten tanzmainz dancers are incredibly gifted. Tanit Cobas, Mia Boggs, Zachary Chant, Finn Lakeberg, Daria Hlinkina, Federico Longo, Lin van Kaam, Elisabeth Gareis, Thomas Van Praet, and Jose Garrido.

Finn Lakeberg and Thomas Van Praet were the gentle giants who quietly dominated the stage. Ukrainian Daria Hlinkina and Mia Boggs were tossed from one to the other with style and ease. Mia is small but oh so powerful. Lisa Gareis was effortless queen of all she surveyed, and brought particular clarity to this ambiguity, combining technical precision with an openness that made the work's repeated descents feel human rather than merely acrobatic. Panamanian Jose Garrido is one to watch.

The design elements reinforced the piece's atmospheric pull. Lighting designer Sebastian Ahrena, shaped the stage with pools of light and deep shadow, while Miguel Marin built a score that moved between hush, pulse and rupture. Rather than illustrating the choreography, these elements gave it emotional texture.

Paloma Muñoz's NÁCAR burst onto the stage with a different kind of charge. Muñoz, whose work returned to Malta for this collaboration, created a piece that felt tactile, rhythmic and fiercely ensemble-driven. The title—suggesting nacre, the iridescent material formed inside shells—found an apt physical analogue in the dancers' ability to shift between hardness and softness, polish and rawness.

Paloma has tweaked the choreography giving more emphasis to the spectral elements. This really was Dance of the Zombies. It had its downside in that the result was less sexy than the previous version but fans need not fear the piece is still highly charged. Mario Manara continues to be hypnotic, engaging closely with the audience.

The choreography was built from sharp isolations, rapid directional changes and close-contact partnering. The performers seemed constantly to negotiate space: advancing, retreating, mirroring, disrupting. There was a welcome sense of risk in the timing. Rather than settling into predictable unison, the group allowed small fractures to appear—an arm arriving late, a gaze diverted, a body pulled out of formation—before snapping back into collective purpose.

The ŻfinMalta dancers—Maya Attard, Andrea Biagioni, Martí Blanco Romeu, Pearl Calleja, Lotte La Haye, Mario Manara, Alessandro Pellegrinelli, Elisa Ruffato, Amber Van Veen, alongside apprentices Victoria Mercieca and Nina Ragonesi—met Muñoz's demands with impressive commitment. Their stamina was evident, but more impressive was their attentiveness: this was dancing that required listening as much as executing.

The result was a work about memory as much as movement: echoes of previous gestures returning in altered forms, as though the dancers were continually remembering bodies they had already left behind. And in their ghostly make up that is no doubt what was intended.

Together, the two works made a persuasive pairing. Echoes – Fall Seven Times invited the audience into a meditative space of vulnerability; NÁCAR answered with vitality, precision and collective momentum. Neither piece relied on narrative explanation, yet both communicated clearly through the intelligence of their structures and the conviction of their performers.

The evening's greatest strength was its refusal of easy spectacle. These were dances about process: falling and recovering, fragmenting and reforming, remembering and letting go. ŻfinMalta and its collaborators offered not just technically accomplished contemporary dance, but a reminder of how powerfully bodies can think, listen and transform. Bravo Matthew William Robinson, ZM's artistic director, and all the supportive team at NAPA.