There aren't a a lot of options for fans of dance at the Fringe this year — Nova Dance co-founder Rachelle Bourget's After the Cause is the only show listed in the "dance" category. Fortunately for fans of contemporary dance, it's a powerful piece.

It begins with a deliberately slow start — a woman sitting mostly still under a bare light bulb while a voiceover about bad life choices, depression and cocaine-addicted lab rats plays in the background. What follows, though, is a sometimes explosive and often unsettling physical exploration of being trapped and trying to escape.

Bourget is a skilled dancer — sometimes fluid, sometimes violently spastic — and while her show has some rough edges (some sequences, like one set to a pulsating strobe light, run too long), it is consistently evocative.

Set to a bass-heavy soundtrack that's sometimes droning, sometimes screeching, sometimes pounding, After the Cause is also claustrophobic, moody and tense — which I think is very much what Bourget is going for.

It's a piece that won't be to everyone's liking, but it packs a punch.