Ben Kulvichit

Screensaver Series by Janine Harrington. Lighting design, Zeynep Kepekli. Photo: Roswitha Chesher. Janine Harrington’s Screensaver Series is a piece of ambient dance – like a screensaver, it moves (laterally, not going anywhere in particular) at its algorithmically determined pace, quite undemanding of one’s attention. But if you do give it your attention, it’s mesmerising. Five dancers sit or kneel in a line along the y axis of the performance space, one in front of the other.

Ivor MacAskill and Rosana Cade in The Making of Pinocchio. Design, Tim Spooner; lighting design, Jo Palmer. Photo: Tiu Makkonen. Like Blue Peter presenters, Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill show us around their set, leading us backstage into the props area. How are we going to make the whale? It’ll have be realistic, they ask. Cade makes a knowing in-joke for those in the audience familiar with the part of making a show where you’ve really just run out of good ideas: It might be a budget question.

A Rain Walk at The Place. Photo: Jemima Yong. Rain brings to mind a broad set of associations. Staring at streams running down a window in a melancholy funk. Silver screen lovers kissing in an ecstatic downpour. A child in wellies splashing in puddles. The bringing of an apocalyptic flood. If weather and mood are closely related, psychosomatically and linguistically – sunny dispositions, fogs of depression – then the rain is a pleasingly malleable symbol.