Gesualdo Passione review – six singers and four dancers deliver a mishmash with a mystical tingle

The marrying of music and dance is an indefatigable exploration. There are countless ways to fuse the two or play them off against one another, especially when musicians and dancers are physically sharing the stage.

In a UK premiere for Dance Umbrella festival, here is a 400-year-old piece of music, Carlos Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsoria, and six singers from baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants entwined with four dancers choreographed by Senegal-born, France-based Amala Dianor. They are not obvious bedfellows – a Muslim choreographer who started out in hip-hop, alongside sacred vocal music on the Passion of Jesus from 1611 – and the unexpected coupling brings consonance and dissonance.

At first the performers move as one unit, singers and dancers together in slow procession. All are dressed in black except Damiano Bigi’s Jesus, in white. The musicians are agile of voice, measured in movement, their sound never losing its refinement even when, for example, they’re called to sing lying on the floor.

The dance does not always bow to the music … Gesualdo Passione. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Dianor leans into iconic imagery: Judas’s kiss, the crucifixion, Jesus’s body cradled by soprano Miriam Allan, a proxy Mary. There are some exquisite moments. Musical sections recur, so when they first sing of Christ’s last breath, the singers are kneeling around Jesus’s folded body. When the phrase is repeated, the singers return to their places but the body has disappeared, and a mystical tingle hangs in the air.

The dancers, as they break from the pack, have heavy human bodies, not heavenly ones. There’s urgency in their controlled convulsions. But the dance does not always bow to the music; it follows its own unsentimental mode and is rhythmically independent, especially when the dancers begin to stomp their feet in a pulsing pattern, infiltrating the spacious resonance of the music.

When the singers line up along the front of the stage and face the audience, there’s a relief in being able to focus on the music’s own movement, to see who is singing each part, bringing clarity to the ever-shifting harmonies. Meanwhile, Xavier Lazarini’s lighting turns dancers into silhouettes, like shadow puppets. He also makes columns of light flicker like glowing torches, creating a sacred space to hold this music of Holy Week. But in terms of choreography, perhaps passion is the missing connection.

• Dance Umbrella festival continues until 31 October