Part of a head, a nebula with its eyes closed, is being wiped away at the edge of space. Just a slice at the top: the pink wash being swept at by the black, chalked gigantic eyes closed gently beneath. Over the page a limb won't fit into view; only the foot and green/black calf are visible, in places stained by water and trailed by lights. Later, fluorescent powdery stars appear, mysterious chalk matrices, creatures cut from polygons of clear ice, flowing sourceless rivers—illustrated by Sepidar Hosseini, Underart's programme is like a little universe or book of dreams. Body, river, body, blackness—the elements become less distinct as they're suspended in sea, sky and space. Each drawing looks equally readable right way up, upside down, or turned to either side, and accordingly the text pages, which detail Olle's experience of his crash and the creation of Underart, set Swedish and English across each other and ask the book to be rotated.

It is December 27th at the International Scene of Contemporary Dance in Stockholm. They stand watching but are not allowed to touch. It is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. I am lying there awake and for an instant I believe I am levitating. I can not feel my body. A brief moment later, I understand. It is the moment just after the landing and just before everything changes. Only minutes ago, I was jumping high up into the air, doing a triple somersault. I lost control and it turned into two-and-a-half rounds ending straight on my head. Within that second I heard my neck break. A moment devoid of time. The sound of the neck break echoed in my head, itself an endless, dark, spherical space in which I was hovering weightlessly.

The memories in the Underart programme may have been shaved down to a few icy seconds of direct recall, but the stage performance they inspire takes quite a different tack. While images of restriction, isolation and recovery are all obliquely there, Olle's story is not represented literally or sequentially, and directing the show his intention was to disperse the intensity of his experience into the detail of everyday life. 'I felt I had to talk about my history a bit, my crash landing, but I didn't want it to be obvious in the result. Instead it felt important to be saying something about boredom, and nothingness.'

"I felt for Underart that we had to explore the importance of nothingness—and I think it's hard to do nothing as a circus artist." (40s)

And so the pace of Underart is, sometimes, quite relaxed. The seven people on stage (five circus artists, two musicians) spend quite a lot of time watching each other, or just standing there letting the audience look them over. They move through some relaxed stretching, perform a sedate hula hoop routine (mostly just round and round), and put everything briefly on hold for Matias Salmenaho's swift coffee break. The circus moments that coalesce out of this atmosphere are not themselves so straightforward: they have the usual intensity of physical investment (Olle remembers doing teeterboard: 'Being in the focused state a circus stunt demands is among the most naked, unguarded things you can do in front of an audience'), but they've been mixed uncertainly with the memory of the accident, and, in a way, touched by its nothingness. They seem to occupy the same area. There's the circus act as a few seconds of execution that compacts and realises years of training, and there's the accident as a little twist of space that changes the course of a life—the implications of one unfolding backwards, the other forwards. The project of Underart seems to be to embrace both, but also to try to extend the energy of the big trick out a little, or to see what other kinds of action it might inhabit.