A Company 605 production. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Thursday, December 8. Continues until December 10

The blizzard didn’t materialize as early as forecast on Thursday evening, but despite the frigid calm outside, there was definitely a full-blown storm happening inside the Firehall Arts Centre.

Rarely has partnering been as intense as it was between dancers Josh Martin and Hilary Maxwell, who hurtled around the stage in countless tortured combinations. It was European innovator German Jauregui who moulded their bodies into this high-speed, ever-shifting game of perpetual contact and motion. In one extended sequence, they writhed and wrestled while clamping their palms over each other’s eyes. Hands and limbs tangled and grasped, and the dancers pushed, swung, hurled, and rolled each other through space. It was movement as violent as it was complex—a physical feat by any measure.

That intensity, set to Stefan Smulovitz’s driving electronic score, was so unrelenting that it eventually sent viewers into a hypnotic space where it was hard to take in more. The oddest effect of the partnering, though, was the interaction between the two dancers, a chemistry that came off as far more combative and athletic than human or compassionate. This may have entirely been the point, but the tone gives Albatross a hardness. And it’s difficult to emotionally engage with it.

Still, it would be a mistake to suggest the work is all about physical wizardry. Albatross was bookended by surreal dance-theatre sequences. The opening moment was stunning, the white-plastic stage floor bathed in a swaying, projected-video forest; the mound in the centre turned out to be Maxwell, who slid out from beneath the plastic sheet to enact a strange ritual we can only tell you involved hypodermic needles and a blindfold. Martin’s entry was equally arresting, the Company 605 co–artistic director backing in toward us, falling over and over as he moved. The end sequence brought another bizarre ritual, this time with chalk and a bowl of milk. Finally freed of his partner, Martin made a dramatic exit out the back door of the Firehall—leaving behind a blast of the wintry air and a serene view of the courtyard tree.

So what did it all mean?

In his program notes, Brussels-based Jauregui insists “silence is the only place from where we can approach theatre.” That means no explanations, no talk of themes. We do know from a Straight preview of a rehearsal that it was originally inspired by a Renaissance painting called The Expulsion From Paradise, depicting Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. And there is a sense of inescapable togetherness and torment between these two incredible dancers that that painting suggests. The title, Albatross, also denotes a struggle with burden—and you wonder, when the pair finally unglue themselves from one another, whether one person embodies that weight, or whether they are the albatross to each other. Martin, whose head Maxwell seems to lull into death with her thigh near the end of the work, certainly looks freer and less tortured leaving through that door than he does entering.

Either way, you’ll find this blast of Euro avant-garde—another bold move from the folks at 605—as bracing as that wind bringing in the Arctic front.