If Rodin’s “Thinker” were a dance, it might be Emanuel Gat’s Winter Variations. With his massive shoulders, the bronze nude is so unlikely a thinker that he makes you wonder what kind of odd work thought is. Likewise, the Israeli choreographer presents an untidy portrait of what can never be seen – two people thinking together – by means of what can only be seen – dance – and thus prompts the melancholy question, is it ever only possible to think alone?

Roy Assaf and Emanuel Gat (lower)

To the sound of a jet taking off, Roy Assaf and Gat begin the nearly hour-long duet strictly to one side of a vast stage striped with shadows. At oblique angles to each other and with gazes drawn inward, the men alternate movement – encircling their faces with florid arms; bounding with rubbery ease into squats as if in a dream – with stillness. The two may do the same moves, but they don’t do them at the same time. They each constitute the other’s ever-shifting periphery: a haplessly beautiful phenomenon.

Eventually, to the accompaniment of bittersweet song, they do look at each other and wrap their arms around the other’s waist to lope round the stage. At one point they meet by walking on their knees – across the desert, I want to say, because the old cliché has sprung to life. Still, the dance loses steam midway. After such a charged start, where was there for it to go?

When the glowingly abject Assaf is dancing, wherever would be fine. Gat moves like a club dancer, his head held stiff against the undulations of torso and limbs. His head seems to be watching his body move. Assaf’s head, by contrast, follows the spine; if his body were a mind, it would be absorbed in thought.

The second work on the programme (which repeats tonight and Friday), the aptly named Silent Ballet, offers no such mystery. Choreographers who deny us the pleasures and complexities of music usually believe, as indeed the musically trained Gat does, that they’re stripping dance down to essentials. But it doesn’t feel like that. Silent Ballet provokes a long series of irritated questions: Why are the dancers stopping? Why are they starting? Why are they huddling? Why are they gesticulating? When will it be over?

In half an hour, thank goodness. ★★★☆☆