Electric Hotel is an outdoor performance in a prefab tawdy looking American hotel building for seven dancers, where the audience are invited to listen in through a set of headphones, guided by sound. With four floors and full-length windows, the hotel encapsulates the lives of seven characters, connected by a mysterious blue box and a piercing scream. Directed by Shunt co-founder David Rosenberg, choreographed by Frauke Requardt, designed by Borkur Jonsson and with composition and sound design by Ben and Max Ringham, the performance is a truly collaborative piece that grants its audience the possibility of gazing as deep as they wish into the lives of the people before them.

Structured in loops of movement that develop and accentuate different links between the characters with each repetition, Electric Hotel places the audience in the position of the voyeur, guiding their gaze inside rooms, in amongst bodies and relationships. With each loop the sound reveals different details, suggesting narrative connections and supporting the strong symbolism of the precise and evocative choreography.

Highly reminiscent of David Lynch’s Californian films such as Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, Electric Hotel creates its tension by turning the daily lives of its inhabitants into an emotional hotbed, in which personal tragedy and the hotel’s dark underworld are brought to the fore. From the opening scenes in which we are invited to observe habits, relationships and day to day life, the performance progresses to express the inner being of its protagonists underpinned by a sense of broiling violence, isolation and unfulfilled desire.

Electric Hotel is both a dark tale of loss and a beautiful celebration of the gaze. It feels like the culmination of a brewing desire to experience what happens on the other side of bricks, windows and shadows. Yet the performance toys with voyeurism, creating a world of mad tensions, dark desires and lost dreams in a beautifully symbolic and cinematic auditory and visual experience.

Three actors walk on stage and take turns describing, and at key moments enacting, scenes from Ali Zaidi’s action-packed life. Behind the actors are three large video screens onto which images are projected throughout the evening. Images which at times comment on what has just been said or at others help to illustrate an important point. Such is the case of the beautiful stills taken from Zaidi’s father's films .

As a renowned director in India’s flourishing film industry, Zaidi’s father encouraged his son’s early love of cinema by getting him to appear in many of his films. This idyllic childhood was shattered though when Zaidi’s father took the family on a mysterious picnic – a picnic which only ended once the family had arrived in Pakistan. This was perhaps a journey that his father felt compelled to make as a Muslim living in India.

The play then jumps forward to show a teenage Zaidi, a boy constantly testing the limits of his family’s patience. Zaidi playfully describes his younger self as “the one with horns”, an expression used to describe a child who could be seen as presenting a challenge to his parents. The biggest challenge though, comes after emigrating to England and returning home with his male lover. One of the most moving moments in the piece comes when the young adult Ali addesses his uncomprehending father. The father is played by Zaidi himself and is shown only as an image projected on the wall. What makes this conversation so moving is that it not only highlights his father’s inability to completely understand his son but also his desire to continue to try to find a way through this seemingly impossible impasse. Throughout the evening delicious Indian delicacies are served, created from Zaidi’s own recipes.

The piece concludes with an account of a recent incident which took place in India when Zaidi returned for a brief visit. A taxi driver, unaware that Zaidi is Muslim, cheerfully recounts attacking Muslims in a recent upsurge of secrtarian violence. Once Zaidi reveals to the driver his religious persuasion, the man is stunned. When they arrive at his destination the driver refuses to take Zaidi’s tip, but instead gets out of the taxi and to Zaidi’s surprise embraces him. In many ways this single act ecapsulates the central theme of the play: the most important journey any of us can make is the the journey to love those around us.

A feast for all the senses, Journeys of Love could prove to be the company’s most outstanding show to date.

Alexander McQueen’s costumes provide a fluidly sculptural playground, where fan-play fuses with swordplay, and the sartorial formalities of Louis Quinze and traditional Kabuki collide. Maliphant births himself from the cocoon of a golden kimono, only to be re-absorbed by its rapaciously sensuous embrace. Guillem has a thrilling solo in which letter-writing becomes duelling, her long Japanese sleeves first doing duty as parchment, then whirling though the air in desperate billows of self-concealment. The slow-motion sequence in which her male-garbed Chevalier is forcibly parted from her masculine attire and identity is harrowing in its poignant simplicity. Lepage is noticeably and inevitably slow-footed by comparison with his co-creators when all three dance in unison, but alone he moves with commanding grace, inhabiting the crumbling facade of the ageing d’Éon with paradoxical dignity and gravitas.

A set of screens keeps re-enacting Jove’s vengeful severance of the sexes, sundering partners as well as scenes, and sometimes fracturing the show’s subtle chain of allusive symbols in the process. Some passages of monologue also obtrude inelegantly, curtailing as well as illuminating the possible meanings of d’Éon’s convoluted biography (especially since they aren’t always wholly audible from the higher levels of the theatre).

Eonnagata is a diffuse, episodic and sometimes meandering meditation upon identity and gender, with moments of painful intensity interspersed with passages of narrative obscurity. The closing movement of the drama, in which d’Éon’s reflection upon his/her own life is playfully relayed through some magical mirror trickery, lends a welcome coherence to a stylish, beguiling and courageous, if occasionally bewildering, creative collaboration.