When Liza Penkova came to Sweden from Russia in the 1990s as a teenager, it took her some time to understand the new Western reality. Much was similar, but even more unfamiliar. Then, as a classically trained dance student, she was also introduced to Western contemporary dance, which later became the basis of her long international career as a dancer with choreographers Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Michele Noiret, Helena Franzen, Gothenburg Ballet company among others.

Thirty years later, in her first solo-work as a choreographer, THE GAP, she draws a parallel between the move to the West and the transition to the contemporary dance aesthetic. She tries to make visible a sense of constant delay. A kind of temporal gap that she needed to fill in order to catch up with Western freedom. Alternating between silence, music, voices from dance icons and her own reflections on norms and values between East and West, the audience is drawn into an hour-long dance solo with elements of melodrama and humor.