A young woman returns from shopping. The flat is quiet. Then the television comes on, babbling into the silence. The woman is swept up in a swelling storm of apparitions – information? Thoughts? Accusations? – as if a genie had escaped from a bottle, or in this case, from a half-eaten apple. The film’s visual style integrates animations and text like a collage, drawing on genre conventions; the film’s frenzy mirrors the dance, and the dance, in turn, mirrors the protagonist’s experience.

How do we relate to one another, to ourselves and to the world around us? The film has its two protagonists looking up at the sky; the camera looks down on them as they stand on the tarmac. Techniques from contact improvisation meet digital animation; a story emerges through dialogue, dance and AI-generated imagery. Digital transformations, as if by magic, liquefy the dancers’ external identities. This partnered dance symbolises how we perceive others, based on our own inner states, feelings and dreams.

Through the streets of Venice Beach in California, marginalisation and deprivation go hand in hand with excess and wealth. One city, two men. Life and passion. The two experience the same moments and repeatedly drift off into parallel worlds – perhaps the past, perhaps the future.

Through the medium of dance and what the locations have to offer, the film explores emotions such as isolation and belonging, contempt and compassion.

Kika and Pedro meet in an old-fashioned café (smoking permitted). A few times, starting over again and again. Gestures of conversation turn into hands touching across the table; heads grow heavy; moods shift. Somewhere, there is still momentum: in navigating feelings, memories, touches, struggles and desires; a couple’s dance on the carpet, full of romance and reality. If such a thing exists. Ash falls.

The dancing couple directed the piece themselves.

A dancer is expecting a child. She is heavily pregnant. She drifts through her flat, moving between everyday life and gentle dance. Her voice accompanies her; she counts constantly, weaving her thoughts between the sequences of numbers. Turbulent emotions, the future and the past, physical and mental changes, coupled with these turbulent times: she and the film explore these themes through contemporary dance. It depicts the journey towards oneself and beyond. Then the child arrives – a new human being.