On their first visit to Herefordshire in July last year, Chess and Cristina – collectively The Hiccup Project – won themselves a lot of new fans. This week they visited the city again with their new show, only the second they’ve made together, and demonstrated once again how willing they are to lay themselves bare and expose themselves emotionally in their unique mix of dance, physical theatre and thought-provoking slivers of drama.

The catalyst for the new show, It’s Okay, I’m Dealing with It, was the realisation that both had suffered accidents to their teeth when younger, accidents that left them feeling vulnerable, and it is vulnerability and the human impulse to grit the teeth and soldier on, with a smile firmly pinned in place, that lies at the heart of the show. And they couldn’t have chosen a more heartbreaking song to hammer that message home than Nat King Cole’s Smile as it accompanied a gradual crumbling of Chess’s desperate smile ….

Deftly dismissing the often trite advice offered to dispel the feeling that things really aren’t OK at all, advice that includes clapping (not so good when someone dies) or a bit of arts and crafts (less than helpful when your heart’s been broken), Chess and Cristina run the gamut of emotions, from hysterical laughter to uncontrollable tears, and from palpable fear to unbridled joy as they explore their own responses to feeling vulnerable.

In their notes about the show, Chess and Cristina say they hope it will raised questions ‘about many important parts of the bizarre culture we live in … that prides itself on making sure that everything is fine/good/okay, a culture that thinks ‘vulnerability’ is a weakness.

It’s testament to the success of their creation that this supremely energetic duo can leave one feeling simultaneously uplifted by the sheer daftness and deftness, physically and emotionally, of their observations and quietly thoughtful about just how acute those same observations are - surely no one who’s seen It’s Okay, I’m dealing with it can fail to recognise the truth of the drunken confessional hangover – when you’re hit with the double whammy of having both drunk too much and spilled too much of yourself and your secrets. With vulnerability comes fear, but why is it so hard to talk …?