United Kingdom Montoya, Thompson, Cowton, PUSH: Sadler’s Wells in collaboration with Russell Maliphant and Sylvie Guillem, London Coliseum, 3.8.2014 (J.O’D)
Solo
Dancer: Sylvie Guillem
Choreography: Russell Maliphant
Lighting Design: Michael Hulls
Music: Carlos Montoya
Sound Designer: Andy Cowton
Costume Realisation: Ha Van-Volika
Shift
Dancer: Russell Maliphant
Choreography: Russell Maliphant
Lighting Design: Michael Hulls
Music: Shirley Thompson
Two
Dancer: Sylvie Guillem
Choreography: Russell Maliphant
Lighting Design: Michael Hulls
Music: Andy Cowton
Push
Dancers: Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant
Choreography: Russell Maliphant
Lighting Design: Michael Hulls
Music: Andy Cowton
Vocals: Barbara Gellhorn
Costume Realisation: Sasha Keir
After presenting three new works at Sadler’s Wells two months ago in a programme entitled Still Current, choreographer and dancer Russell Maliphant brought four earlier pieces to the London Coliseum last week. While the Sadler’s Wells programme showed work created for, and danced with, three younger dancers, in PUSH Maliphant was accompanied by Sylvie Guillem, a dancer of more or less his own age. It was on Guillem in 2005 that two of the four works in the programme, Solo and Push (a duet with Maliphant as her partner) had been made. A third, Two, was ‘given new life’ by Guillem after first being performed by Dana Fouras in 1997. The fourth, Shift (from 1996), was the solo for himself that could be said to have launched Maliphant and the 2014 Olivier Award-winning lighting designer Michael Hulls on their careers.
Solo, the first work to be performed, was a rather gentle, even cautious, start despite the flamenco rhythms of Carlos Montoya’s (recorded) music. Wearing a diaphanous trouser suit, the wiry Guillem cut and sliced the air with her arms as she spun about the stage. Only once or twice did she raise her leg, very briefly, in a startling, twelve o’clock extension. Footwork was present mostly in a borrowed form: the clicking of heels on the soundtrack. In Shift, which was next, Russell Maliphant moved solipsistically between lights at floor level at the front of the stage that threw shadows of his figure on to panels at the back. Depending on how close he came to the lights, the shadows were larger or smaller, more blurred or more sharply defined. The lights were angled in such a way that the silhouettes seemed always about to perform autonomous movement. They came and went, too, as Maliphant shifted postion from one side of the stage to another. The music, a string serenade by Shirley Thompson, created a melancholy atmosphere; there was a strange sense of loss in the final moments as Maliphant, and his last shadow, faded into darkness.
Andy Cowton’s music for Two is not melancholy. It pulses and echoes and throbs. It ramped things up. Two has been performed in London, in different versions, at least four times in the past year and a half. It was performed in the Still Current programme by the young Carys Staton in a way that you might have thought could not be bettered. Yet the nearly fifty-year-old Guillem, standing in the square of shadow in the shaft of light, brought to it a steely precision of her own.
Push, the final work, brought the two dancers together. Out of darkness, and from the back of the stage, Maliphant slowly appears bearing Guillem aloft. His bowed back and shoulders are a secure platform on which she can move. For a long time she has no contact with the floor. The music (Andy Cowton again) has religious overtones. To be suspended in air is to be connected to the spiritual. When she is lowered to the ground, the dancing is almost ballroom-like, before the blueish light switches to orange and the movement becomes more urgent. The dancers push against each other’s bodies as if to test one another, or themselves. They perform handstands, using the other’s body as support. There is a growing sense of familiarity, daring and trust. The piece ends as Maliphant lifts Guillem into the air once again. The lights go out as she is still directing one arm on an unswerving, upward course.
John O’Dwyer