I have written before of Rachel Wesson and her Leeds-based company Ascendance Rep; of how she strives to take dance out to towns and their people, by presenting performances in local venues, in shops and libraries, in galleries and churches, by educating in schools through classes and workshops. It is dance as it should be, at the heart of local communities, and though small in size, Ascendance Rep is huge in ambition, with thanks to a grant from the Arts Council and funding from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. Now the company places itself in residence at the cathedrals of our land performing one work – Jacky Lansley’s Standing Stones – on a year-long tour. It is a piece exploring these buildings’ unique structures, their historical identities, their spiritual developments and no grander place to begin than at the Minster in York, whose stones echo with the sounds of Mystery and Miracle Plays of centuries past.

These form the idée fixe by which we might understand Standing Stones - the four dancers (Daniella Ferreira, Ayano Honda, Katie Keeble and Paul Wilkinson) got up in vivid primary colours as Mediaeval Mummers, their faces striking the attitudes of gargoyles and misericords expelling the devils from out of the place. References might well be biblical - the distribution of apples a sign of Original Sin; a dancer holds the stance of crucifixion – yet so too are they Pagan, as when another dancer becomes a human Maypole, around which the others (be-ribboned) loop and wind. But there is nothing overtly “preachy” about Lansley’s work, rather it is poetic in its effect on site and space.

Her score is a piano and clarinet arrangement of Mozart’s beautiful Clarinet Quintet, played live by David White and Jonathan Delbridge (though it requires a drier acoustic – and a better tuned piano – than the Minster is able to offer) and her response to it, especially so in its slow second movement, is touchingly pure. Lansley allows the music to sing for itself, the dancers seeming to hear and respond to it as if the clarinet were bird-song and she gives it space to breathe within her movement. The music’s structure is reflected in the dance’s motifs – one sees the dancers performing (in sequence) a kind of arabesque allongée (though with both arms in front) and then threading their legs through these out-stretched arms; another sees one dancer resting his head upon his hands and then bending low and seeming to scoop his head back up. – and always it is a fascinating and truthful exposition on Mozart’s score. In its dancers Lansley and Wesson have performers of complete integrity; and at forty-five minutes in length, it is the perfect size. Catch it as it comes to a Cathedral near you.

Dancers: Ferreira, Honda, Keeble, Wilkinson