Konstantin Grouss

The sign showed itself most clearly in the work with Alexei Lubimov's musical programmes, the first of which — Amores, to music by John Cage — was made in September 2004. A whole series of programmes followed: Bacchanale in the Garden of Stones, Four Walls in the Rachmaninov Hall, Cage for Air. The roots of the movement vocabulary, he has said, are in Joan Miró's compositions and in Cage's own musical notation: pictograms, a way of writing a form down rather than describing it. A critic reviewing him years later called the dancing hieroglyphic, and he agreed.

The sign kept reappearing. In Mask for Body (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 2006) the body used movement as a mask. In Notes (2010) choreography was made out of a linguistic symbol, for a festival whose subject was translation — and it was there that the work crossed out of dance and into contemporary art. In EASY-COME-EASY-GO<at>BODY<dot>MOVE, begun at the Garage Museum in 2014 and premiered at the State Theatre of Nations in 2018, a live news feed was read through the body by a motion sensor and converted back into sound: one sign turned into another, with the body as the processor.

In The Swans Have Arrived! (2018), ballerinas built from scrap found in a botanical garden made a sign that played Tchaikovsky in the head of anyone who recognised it, and stayed scarecrows for everyone else — and the tutus they wore were real, given by the ballet-wear house Grishko. Standing beside them on the pond of the Apothecary Garden he called them "our homage to ballet": a choreographer's sentence about an object that cannot move. The sculpture turned out to be time-based anyway. The festival closed in August; the swans stayed on the water through the autumn and under the snow until the following spring, so that the piece anyone saw depended on the month they came. A work about stillness took a year to perform.