This month I’ve been venturing into the further reaches of modern dance – obscure territory where I don’t feel particularly comfortable. In its hinterland is the Judson Church in New York: it was here, during the early 1960s, that young Turks such as Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton began investigating the idea that dance need not involve formalised gestures or what primary school teachers call ‘movement to music’, but could grow instead out of quotidian activities such as running, jumping and walking. From that point of departure, the journey has become ever more extreme and contorted, traversing the realms of performance art and installation, often politicised and sometimes pornographic.

The Korean Howool Baek doesn’t want us to see her face. At The Place, she sat cross-legged on the ground with her back to the audience and allowed parts of her body to do the talking and thinking. Her shoulder blades jostled for attention, her fingers strummed a nervous tune, her splayed limbs seemed to take on a will and character of their own, almost as though they were in rebellion against the trunk that attempted to control them. It was a weirdly compelling spectacle, followed by a short film in which three dancers, multiplied by the magic of CGI and bent double so that only mops of hair are visible, became a plague of marauding aliens stomping through Berlin landmarks such as the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. I thought this madly funny, but everyone else in the audience remained po-faced.

At Sadler’s Wells, the GoteborgsOperans Danskompani presented Damien Jalet’s Skid – a big international hit since its première in 2017. The stage is filled with a square white platform (covered with plastic, presumably greased in some way) slanted at an angle of 34° – the limit at which humans can stand upright. What ensues is a thrilling fight against gravity, based in what Jalet calls ‘a poetics of surrender and resistance’, pivoting on ‘the attempt to climb and the fear of falling’.

Skid’s first section rehearses a hundred playful and poignant ways to slide down a hill, fast or slow, solo or tagged, diving or spinning. A black-clad fascistic phalanx on its knees then makes a more determined assault that disintegrates into chaos. A final section movingly shows a lone naked man struggling out of a womb and making his hesitant yet heroic way up the slope, only to fling himself into the abyss behind when he reaches its pinnacle – a simple metaphor for the efforts of all humankind. Skid also resonated with terrors familiar to every skier or mountaineer as they peer down a precipitous valley. A dozen dancers master the challenges with staggering aplomb.

Stunts, gimmicks, tricks, hot air? I don’t deny there were elements of repetition and longueur in both events, but at least one could see what point they were trying to make. At the Barbican, the American Trajal Harrell refuses to elucidate any defined purpose or meaning. The first part of his Porca Miseria, ‘Deathbed’, ends with something like a funeral cortège, but otherwise offers a catwalk parade of casual lawless improvisation, a ritual without rules or shape in which non-binary hippies wait for the spirit to move them, clothed in bits and bobs from a dressing-up box and idly picking up on fragments of music like children playing a private solitary game. This spectacle is not without its moments of wistful poetry and eccentric charm, but with a running time of 75 minutes, it demands more of one’s attention than it merits.

So these are snapshots of what is happening on the borders of dance. An aesthetic of graceful curves and classical symmetries that dates back to the Renaissance seems to be reaching exhaustion: is the future only a chaos of unanswerable questions and random choices?