New Solo
Choreography
Russell Maliphant
Lighting
Michael Hulls
Dancer
Alexander Varona
Transmission
Choreography
Russell Maliphant
Lighting
Michael Hulls
Music
mukul
Costumes
Sasha Kier
Dancers
Elisabetta d'Aloia
Julie Guibert
Saiko Kino
Roberta Pitre
Winifred
Burnet-Smith.
Push
Choreography
Russell Maliphant
Lighting
Michael Hulls
Music
Andy Cowton
Costumes
Sasha Kier
Dancers
Julie Guibert
Alexander Varona
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Russell Maliphant
Company
Sadler's Wells
6 & 7 April 2006
Russell Maliphant's New Solo, Transmission, and Push are, in his words, intended to comprise a programme that "signfies a new phase" for him and his company. This 'new phase' has a collaborative identity, in which lighting and music have shaped the end result. The other new element is casting, with this programme presenting the dancers Alexander Varona and Julie Guibert to a London audience for the first time.
Varona is an exceptional find for Maliphant. His movements are as fluid - if not more so - than Maliphant's own, yielding to the choreographer's imagination as if placed in a mould and then trickled out. First seen centre stage under a spotlight in New Solo, his rippling muscularity allowed his torso and shoulders to become increasingly liquid as beats layered into rhythmic complexity. For the ten minutes in which the solo lasted it was predictably stamped with Maliphant's impress. Between the winding up and winding down, the added and stripped layers of sound at beginning and end, the middle section was a rapid whirl of description around the vertical axis. At times, movement was 'in' towards the body, creating centred and meditative moments to counterpoint the slicing, descriptive lines tracked by hands and arms, or the curves and circles of legs and feet, as the body sculpted its own space.
Whilst technically breath-taking, however, there is a tendency towards neutrality in Maliphant's choreography, exemplified by the smooth surface that New Solo presented, a surface upon which an audience may write anything. As dance, it was experientially inaccessible, conveying no muscular twitch of recognition. Any idea of Varona's own experience during the solo was hidden in a white-out. He took his curtain call like a man in prison, lost in his own mind. The majority of Maliphant's dancers have this quality, as if chosen by him for their strong and essentially unknowable personality, which in itself becomes the only signification against a neutral background. Beautiful to watch, like an exquisitely photographed nature documentary, the interest is in seeing something alien, something that breathes in a different atmosphere, revealed in its own element.
Transmission gave this impression, with its five female dancers moving stealthily into the beams of Michael Hulls' lighting design like sharks underwater swimming into the light of a camera. This was during the middle section, where the dynamics between the dancers became complex and alive. Initially they stood apart, each individual's forearm slicing through narrow columns of light to the gathering tempo of morse code, until the movement was fast enough to visualise the stippling sound effect. Forearms finally came to rest in the columns of light, with fingers pointing up or down, at which point the dancers moved into pairs and the focus turned to the joining of their arms, and the transfer of weight and sensation between them, like letters joining to form a word.
The give and take of contact work is hard to do fluidly, without an audience noticing the joins, and at times the melding of limbs was not so seamless, but the supple texture of Saiko Kino's solo took over and set the choreography on track again. In variations of five, the dancers were sometimes prone, sometimes rooted, sometimes in duet, but all the time building to a climax in which their range of movement around the vertical axis was paramount. Standing fixed in one spot, their arms windmilled in descriptive arcs around the various planes of the body, serving only to highlight the centre as the stabilising point. This is so much Maliphant's 'thing'that at times his choreography seemed hackneyed by its own force. So many travelling handstands, so much of one arm unfolding up to the ceiling and focus directed down, the backward drags that brought bodies into new configurations.
It is easy to see why Maliphant is a name in choreography, and this programme serves to reiterate the reasons. But reiteration is not development. What was new about Maliphant's choreography when he made his name is now part of an accepted vocabluary in contemporary dance classes. There is still the air of the enthusiast about this programme, the excitement of one trained in ballet technique who suddenly finds all sorts of possibilities in the vocabluary of dance forms that use weight rather than denying gravity. Push appeared, in this sense of fascination with the push and pull of gravity, especially dated. It still had the power to amaze through the assured unison of Alexander Varona and Julie Guibert (taking over from Maliphant and Guillem), but it grated. At the end of a programme of very similar pieces this was one set of white loose cotton pants too far. The bamboo instrumental sound like trickling water came over as irritatingly pseudo-spiritual, a feng-shui water feature in a garden-centre rockery.
Rather than reiterating his past successes, it would be nice to see Maliphant develop what he's already got, or to see him pit his choreography against a complex classical score. This programme doesn't adequately represent the development that Maliphant seems to think it is when describing a "new phase" of the company.
Laura Keynes
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