If memory serves, it’s been a good two months since Ellie Creighton bought me coffee in Dunne & Crescenzi. Damn good coffee, too. To anyone who knows her, Creighton is the little marketing machine that could. She’s a workaholic with a heart of gold, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and nobody pulls off Jazz Age chic quite like the girl in marketing.

All that makes her likeable. But what makes her interesting is this look she gets sometimes. It’s the kind of look you imagine her getting at a house party, the second she decides she’s going to liven things up. By, y’know, jumping a fence, hotwiring a cement truck and going drag racing on the M50 at four in the morning.

Now, our coffee time was meant to sketch out how this blog should work. And sure, we sketched. But mostly we talked. Actually, mostly Ellie talked – about all the shows lined up, about how everything was falling into place, about how excited she was…

And then she stopped. And got a look in her eye. Correction…she got that look in her eye. ‘There’s this show and it’s got a guy and a girl. And there are these socks, and she’s feeding things into a hoover and…’ She paused. ‘I loved it. I won’t say anymore, but I can’t wait to see what you think.’

She was talking about Alessandro Sciarroni’s Your Girl, a work that, based as it is on Madame Bovary, implicity evokes the incongruity of romantic ideal and unmitigated reality. And yet its ultimate impact is quite contrary to what might be expected of such a provenance.

Under stark lighting, Chiara Bersani and Matteo Ramponi (downstage right, in a wheelchair, and upstage left respectively) meet, challenge but above all engage the audience’s attention. Moving to centre, where an industrial hoover is situated, Bersani first divests herself of her wheelchair’s support. Then, she proceeds to carefully pluck cloth ‘roses’ from her top, each bloom vanishing into the vacuum with a ‘he loves me’, or ‘he loves me not’. Then the top itself and finally her shorts. Each time she switches on the vacuum, her hair is caught, snatched at and whirled around by the expelled air, as if each statement coincides with and expresses an instant of intense emotion.

In the meantime, Ramponi - sitting on a mound of discarded socks and attaching his own socks to three ‘sock ropes’ dangling behind - maintains throughout a self-conscious yet passive demeanour. Joining her, he too strips, Bersani feeding his clothes into the machine (almost without interruption).

As the now naked pair gingerly find each other’s hand, an Italian pop ballad swells triumphantly, bringing this meditation on desire and yearning, self-consciousness and fragility to a quietly affecting and successful conclusion. I only wish we’d had a clearly demarcated ending so that I could have properly expressed my appreciation.

Although it could be asked whether Your Girl veers more towards the installation end of the performance art spectrum, the same could not be asked of the show that preceded it: Se nn ricordo male (If I remember correctly). With a muscular choreography soundly embodied, Eleonora Gennari and Valeria Fiorini establish a vigorous and varied tempo that dispels any hint of the cumbersome or ponderous. In this ‘monologue recited by two voices’, both dancers quite remarkably lend corporeal form to the trace and flash of memory. In motion that though territorially expansive seems ever under restraint, the act of (finally) slipping hands out of pockets is a relief, and pulling feet from shoes, a liberation. The climactic ending underscores it all: the raking violence of emotional memory, how the hook and haul of recall and remembrance can - at one and the same time – drive us towards and deter us from, ransoming the present from the past.

Which reminds me….kudos Creighton. I owe you a coffee.