The Coronet Theatre, London
October 30, 2026
An hour after the end of Non-Ordinary Services (非普通服務), D_Antidote Production (身體處方) from Taiwan presented their second performance of the evening, Palingenesis (㒩). At forty minutes, it’s about ten minutes shorter than the first work, but it packs a bigger punch.
Some of choreographer Chuang Po-Hsiang’s (莊博翔) choreographic trademarks are shared by the two works, but it’s Palingenesis that exhibits them at their finest. Imagine the mythical conjoined tri-leg of the Manx flag (a triskelion, if you’re feeling fancy). If that’s level 1 of strange body combinations, the three masked dancers of Palingenesis crank it up to level 10. Combine that with the hypothesis (mine, not theirs) that three aliens may have devoured the Kama Sutra, and you’re ready.
Photo Wang Yen-tun
After the initial set-up of dancers Liao Chien-yao (廖健堯), Ong Kuan-ying (王官穎) and Lin Ying-ting (林胤廷) in shoulder stands, like human towers, they combine and only rarely part. They’re always together on stage, usually touching, often intertwined. Apart from skin-coloured underwear, they wear only identical masks: strange tortured heads, mouth, nose and ears scarred over and eyes empty sockets save for some rippling gristle.
The collective movements are so bizarre you can only start to figure them out through childhood games and sports. If they’ve been broken apart and reassembled in a different galaxy. One of their core moves starts in the ‘row, row, row your boat’ position: three bodies sit stacked close against each other, almost in one another’s laps, with arms twisting and fingers twirling into a six-legged organism’s antennae.
Another uses a wheelbarrow race position, where the wheelbarrow is lifted up and thrust forward by one dancer, while another stretches out behind to counterbalance. There’s also a human rocking horse wriggling around on stage: two dancers are the curved base and one is the horse. Somehow, it’s a special, indecipherable kind of magic. And then there’s the move where all three follow a seamless cycle of roll over, pull through, slide under. Chuang and the dancers of Palingenesis have mastered the monstrous multi-person roly-poly.
Photo Wang Yen-tun
Bar one or two moments of less tightly synchronised movement where one dancer lagged a little, their synchronicity was stunning. Like a choir inhaling together to ensure they start singing simultaneously, there seemed to be one dancer whose forceful sigh primes the next motion, their breath cocking a weapon, before the collective trigger fires them into more monstrous movement, movement like you’ve never seen it.
All this sits within a more convincing narrative shape than the previous Non-Ordinary Services. There are distinct phases, without solos or duets to tease, distract, or otherwise confuse.
There’s a more sexual phase, where we might have stumbled upon an alien procreation ritual. There’s a more flowing phase with the pointed toes and clean lines of classical dance, when something elegant threatens to break through. There’s a quiet phase, where a violent twitch passes along their (in)human chain like in synapses between neurons, strengthening their connection. There’s a religious phase resembling some sort of cult worship. Later, there’s a something like a rugby maul, where the three dancers link arms back-to-back, forming a circle which rampages around the stage, sometimes launching its participants into supported break-dancing leg flairs; an impressive artistic-athletic feat.
Clear is not quite the right word for such an abstract dance, but the unravelling of the work feels smooth and confident, leaving no space or reason for doubt.
Photo Wang Yen-tun
The wildness of the three-person organism ebbs and flows until, after another rampage, the music changes from a modern, synthetic, beat-heavy track to some soaring orchestral brass and violins. By the time they return to the intertwined row-your-boat position (the seated six-legged creature), there’s the tingling sense that we’re witnessing something special. There’s a metamorphosis of the creature and of our mindset.
The dance brings us to an epiphany: we now understand this creature. It’s not grim or grotesque. It’s now articulate, tender, almost angelic. The beautiful moment expands until they divide into the same three individual towers as before, and then collapse exhausted to the floor, spent bodies heaving. Palingenesis deserves to be a Halloween classic, but it’s far too good to be confined to only a couple of nights a year.
Read Eddy Gibb’s thoughts on ‘Non-Ordinary Services’, D_Antidote Production’s first performance of the evening here.