In the opening scene of As if Snowing, its three dancers revolve around each other like electrons in an atom. Choreographed by Sang Jijia, the City Contemporary Dance Company production is about the passage of time.

Casting Kelvin Mak, who is in his 30s, 40-something Luo Fan and 60-year-old Qiao Yang as the dance trio is meant to visually underline the piece’s theme.

READ MORE: Eastern, Western art in symphony

However, the ease and precision with which Qiao moves on stage during the hourlong show, demonstrating that she is no less capable than her much younger, male partners, when it comes to doing the heavy lifting — quite literally, on a few occasions — also disproves the theory that time spares no one and is particularly ruthless with the career span of dancers.

As if Snowing is as much about loss and memories as about erasing the past and moving on — letting the gathering snowflakes wipe out the imprints left on the earth, and our lives, and leave behind a clean slate.

The piece kicks off on an otherwise bare set (Yuen Hon-wai), except for a rectangular white mattress erected horizontally in the background, awash with a pale white light, conjuring up images of a post-holocaust winter.

After a point the mattress comes down with a loud crash, with one of the dancers slumped on it like a famished traveler, no longer able to drag himself through an unforgiving landscape.

READ MORE: Golden age of forging connections

It is only after its thin edges are turned toward the audience, revealing the “ports” on its side, that they find out that the mattress is in fact designed in the shape of an android phone, probably 100 times the size of a real one.

The winter of discontent in As if Snowing, therefore, could be referring to an immersive digital environment that the dancers find them selves in and need to navigate their way through.

Sometimes the mattress/phone is tilted at an angle to resemble a treacherous slope.

Several attempts to climb it invariably end in the dancers sliding down. At one point, two of the dancers slip inside the mattress cover and work it from the inside, creating a steadily morphing white landscape, as if to suggest that the snow had started melting.

READ MORE: Get immersed in Europe’s finest

Sometimes the dancers behave like snowflakes themselves, gently flopping down on to the mattress. In one scene, Mak’s snowflake gathers more body and becomes a one-person hailstorm — hitting the mattress/ earth harder and making dents into it with each fall.

The best moment of the show are of course when the trio perform in tandem, held, as if it were, by an invisible centrifugal force.

The amazing felicity with which Qiao maneuvers her lithe body on stage, moving in perfect sync with the more robust Mak and Luo, makes for a mesmerizing spectacle.

That the onstage dynamic shared between the three is based on mutual affection, and respect, nurtured over several years of sharing a work space, cannot be more evident.

Credit is due to Dickson Dee for composing a score that while being gentle and melodious in patches also carries a sense of foreboding.

Costume designer Taurus Wah deserves a pat on the back for sewing large and uneven patches of felt with threads hanging loose onto regular jackets.

As soon as the dancers put them on, they are alienated from the audience, and completely believable as characters trying to negotiate their way through a hostile snow-covered terrain in a faraway land.