Through London traffic I arrived a little late for this performance – just a little (4mins) but yes, I still can only apologise. What I tiptoe into is a tranquil, winter-wonderland Uniqlo advert. Four gloriously fluid bodies, all wrapped up in bright colours, rise from and melt into The Place’s stage floor, which has been made white. A view of a city street is projected on the cloth wall behind and snow begins to bluster and fall both on the projection and, at various moments throughout Ben Wright’s piece, on stage as well.

The experience recollected that I think shapes the entire work is the instance of being “wiped out by love” in a New York city snowstorm. It is phrase used by Nuno Silva when he speaks of remembering a relationship. The stimulus of how our bodies and our selves are when in love, is passed from one dancer to the next throughout the work. There are also songs a-plenty, often sung by Silva and strongly enhanced by his effortless versatility.

Text written by David Charles Manners is tightly woven throughout the piece and provides these perplexed, worrisome, graceful, needy and intimate dancers with voices and stories the audience can relate to: a kiss, a touch, a letter saying “I love and miss you”, a thought of "Please don’t be with someone else”…We can all raise our hands to these moments.

Unfortunately, for all its’ merits, The Lessening of Difference did make me feel a little schizophrenic. I was frequently at ease with the work only to become disgruntled moments later by what I saw: I would smile with recognition at having lived through the performance’s scenarios only to furrow my brow again at how situations were being presented.

I think I can only illustrate my frequent changes in mental state with examples:

At one point, Manner’s text concerns itself with boundaries. An American professor type voice booms out that we are all made of the same atoms. All of human beings, nature, the sun… everything. With this in mind, the boundaries I imagine between me and my theatre seat, the boundaries between self and other are false. Then, the word ‘merge’ is used and the dancers begin to step out into the audience, in silhouette. What? I don’t want to merge. I really, really don’t. I get rapidly fed up. But then, the dancers crawl up into the audience and placing their hands on the shoulders of spectators to aid their climb to the back of the raked seating. The moment becomes vibrant and personal. I beam!

Mood swing one.

Mood swing number two comes at the moment when I realise that Wright’s dancers have the capacity to make great lovers. Wright presents physically articulate people who are willing to be vulnerable and unafraid. The dancers embody these aspects passionately and this imbues their performances with generosity. Then, sometime in the middle of the work, these same dancers stand in a line and place their hands on their hearts (they are in love), their throat (they dare not speak), their tummy (they are nervous or pregnant?) and groin (they are aching with desire). We have seen this all before. I don’t need parts of the body signalled to me. I saw the dancers in all their mystical complexity before, and this moment reduced all that they were to body parts.

Lastly, a man in his underwear, holds his duvet by the corner so that the rest trails on the ground. The image feels misjudged. This presentation of a man before me is more like an adult baby than the vulnerable person I think I was supposed to see. I can care about a vulnerable person. This adult male baby sends shivers down my spine. However, in the next instant, we hear this big-boy-lost, tenderly tell his (absent) lover his favourite part of them and says ‘I can do this indefinitely’. Oh! I melt.

I think moments like this are confusing but I think there is still evidence of Wright’s clear vision for sharing intimate spaces. By the time of the curtain call, I am stunned back into realising that there were only four performers in the work. There are so many episodes of love that I certainly do appreciate the sense of journey that the work takes. Multiple experiences is a precarious line to tread however because so many shifting roles within the same story arch of couples in love means that once I have seen them fall in love with each other three or four times, I can then only appreciate the rest of the instances of love or tenderness in terms of representation. Through repetition, I begin to know more and more that in reality, I am watching four dancers represent love to me; I cease to believe their experiences.

For all my chopping and changing, I have to acknowledge that Wright has given himself the creative space to use a very specific memory to choreograph a work. He has talentedly expanded its sensibilities into a public sharing, layered heavily with different experiences which for the most part, still retain a sense of the original recollection's intimacy.