The Israeli choreographer Jasmin Vardimon came to the UK in 1997 and founded a company which has moved from success to success and brought her more awards than I can list here. Four years ago she brought to Oxford her powerful work Park, about the conflicts within a group of people in the concrete cauldron of an urban play-area.

She is renowned for her uniquely theatrical choreographic and directorial style, combining physical theatre, strong characterisation, innovative technologies and dance.

Interestingly, Vardimon worked as a psychological ‘interviewer’ prior to her dance career, and her experience and skills in this area are a driving force in her creative work.

Her latest piece, Justitia (the second T is pronounced like the T in ‘nation’), concerns a murder, and gives us several versions of what actually happened, from which we have to decide who really committed the crime. I asked Jasmin what gave her the idea of presenting a mystery in dance form.

“The inspiration for my work comes from life around me, and there are significant moments that trigger a creation, and for Justitia it was mainly the notion of guilt and justice. I have not actually been involved in a murder inquiry, but I was interested in our notion and our understanding of what justice is.

“The piece is set in two locations; in a courtroom, where you traditionally try to prove ‘not guilty’, and in a group therapy session for people who live with guilt, where you try openly to express your guilt. The crime is played several times from different perspectives, and the audience is in the position of a jury, and is receiving different information all the time.

“Each version gives them a new truth, a new reality, and each audience member may form a different point of view. What I’m interested in is whether or not there is one absolute truth. Does what we actually see extend our point of view, or is it our point of view that dictates what we see ?”

In Justitia a man is found dead on his best friend’s sofa. The friend is a group therapist, and his wife is accused of the murder. A role vital to the development and our understanding of the complex issues involved is that of the court stenographer.

“Her character is important because she reveals different layers of information throughout, because what we see her typing is projected for the audience to read. So we see her thought processes, including getting information about her personal feelings of guilt, historical information about the characters, or any other information that I can only convey by using text. There’s also the next door neighbour who is a witness, the security guard in the court, and the defence lawyer who leads us through the whole experience”.

So, in Vardimon’s mind, is there one correct interpretation of the events portrayed, that the members of the audience, in their role as jurors, should reach, or is every interpretation equally valid?

“They are all valid, because that’s how I believe things are in our justice system today.”

The written text is by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Much of it is also spoken by the cast. I wondered whether the text came first, or whether Lenkiewicz wrote it while the piece was being created, in order to make clear ideas that couldn’t simply be put over through choreography. “It was written throughout the creation of the piece. The process was interpreting my ideas into her words, so it was a very collaborative struggle of writing and making movement.”

All this may sound rather literary, but Vardimon’s reputation is for extremely physical, sometimes even dangerous, movement, and that is also the case with Justitia. She uses video technologies of freeze-frame, re-wind and slow motion, and there are also several extremely physical scenes, bordering on acrobatics and martial arts. In addition to the spoken and projected text there is also a background of sound.

“I normally work with sound-designers, and I work in a very similar way to film, in that the sound is the last element that fits into the work. I use the sound to create an atmosphere, so there are different kinds of music depending on what I’m trying to put over.”

So the dancers learn their steps, or their movement, without any sound-track ? “Yes, but they’re not reacting so much to the movement; they’re reacting to the context, and their task is much more to behave as their character. They have a body language for the character, and sometimes it develops more into choreography, but the chorography relates to the character. For instance, the husband has been a soldier, and the movement that develops from that background is soldier-like, so all the movement starts not from the music, but from another intention.”

This is a visually exciting and mentally intriguing work, and you can make up your own mind about guilt and innocence on Friday, July 10, at the Playhouse.