An Anatomie in Four Quarters opens Clod Ensemble’s Anatomy Season: a month of performances, talks and workshops by artists, scientists, medics and thinkers. Clod Ensemble have been working with medical schools, the Wellcome trust and interested artists for a number of years, exploring the links and mutual benefits between performative and medical approaches to the body.

I do experience a little tickle of joy at the decadence and grandness of a project in which the Sadler’s Wells main stage is booked out for a (comparatively) tiny audience to watch 12 dancers, a collection of string players, a drummer, a bass guitarist, a singer, two actors and some extra dancers who only appear as legs for a short while. There is something wonderful about being invited to view the enormous auditorium and its wide, black stage as a kind of cavernous living organism or perhaps as a surgical theatre in the old sense of the word, from which to examine the bodies moving below.

There is poetry in An Anatomie…, and the thrill of the excitement of being allowed to cross over on to the stage, to walk in places you are not normally allowed to walk and to look up at the huge height of a theatre; its bare bones, its strangely quiet darkness. Theatrical convention holds that the “magic of the theatre” is lost if its tricks are revealed; but looking up into the innards of the beautiful and smoothly functional Sadler’s Wells theatre rekindles in me a little sense of wonder. I feel similarly about the body. It is easy to take for granted the way that everything – mostly – just works. It is only when I start to think and feel the structures that hold it all together that that sense of wonder returns.

Strange then that the real live performing bodies seemed almost coincidental. Their movement, although beautiful at times, didn’t invite me to reflect upon my own anatomy much, nor upon humanities relationship to our bodies as a whole. The performers were almost all highly trained, strong and flexible and lifted their legs up high in the air, or scuttled across the floor at speed. They felt removed from my own body, in that way that highly trained bodies can somehow feel slightly superhuman, and yet, also strangely dwarfed by the drama of the space. When I did reflect on my own body it was mostly to feel a kind of general guilt for not keeping up my own training enough to be able to hold my leg at that height in the air. The presence of the performers made the most sense when they were being used to shift the audience’s perception of the scale of the space, tricks of perspective, or to highlight the relationship between performance, audience and theatre, and much of the extra movement they used whilst doing that felt a little superfluous.