A Contingency Plan and plastic orchid factory production. At the Shadbolt Centre on Friday, October 21. No remaining performances

“I care what you think” is as much about performance art, props, lighting, and sound design as it is about dance—which isn’t a bad thing. Rather, the detail required to make something this visually stunning successful on all levels is nothing short of masterful.

Before the theatre doors open, audience members are each invited to write an anonymous wish on a slip of paper. It’s a clever way of inviting attendees inside a piece purposefully titled to engage. Inside, human-size paper cutouts are posed on the floor, the long white ropes attached to their heads snaking up to overhead lights and looping down to sandbags. A few paper dolls take up seats in the audience, blurring the line between form and flesh.

The piece’s text-based through-line consists of a series of “I wish” statements spoken and recorded by the three dance artists/choreographers, Vanessa Goodman, James Gnam, and Jane Osborne. The trio spent six years talking about what a collaboration between them would look and feel like. Perhaps that’s why “I care what you think” hums at such a high frequency. The artists want to contend with specific human behaviours—observation and action versus reaction—and the tension between the two, particularly as they explore collapsing ideals of perfection and the distance between want and need.

Goodman and Gnam initially depict this with playfulness, lunging in and out of each other’s space, bending backward and forward, all crooked limbs and jagged angles as Osborne slowly begins to raise the cutouts into the air, silent witnesses suspended overhead. Gnam and Osborne follow this with highly controlled upper body movements, each standing behind mikes at opposite ends of the stage, muscles tense and taut, arms flexed and torsos twisting as the “I wish” statements escalate from a whisper to a scream and then back down to a feverish hush. Eventually, Gnam and Osborne find their way back to each other and there’s a genuine tenderness in their bodies, the mood almost romantic as they move past each other’s boundaries and toward something shared.

Just as in real life, though, the lull of sweetness is prime for disruption. As Goodman begins her own recitation, interspersing the audience’s scribbled wishes with the text, Gnam and Osborne loosen the ropes, twisting and contorting across the floor, the cutouts dancing violently as they tangle themselves amid the lengths of rope. The artists and the cutouts are cast in a flurry of shadows and bright lights, alone but together, knotted up as one.