Russell Maliphant’s dance is rooted in ideas of energy and flow, and he’s best known for exploring the beguiling interplay between bodies and light. His latest piece, Vortex, stays true to all those things, while moving in some new directions.
One early scene is typical Maliphant, with lighting designer Ryan Joseph Stafford casting striped light across the dancers’ bodies, as if in the thick of a bamboo forest. Their figures are abstracted, pure motion rather than people, and suitably hypnotic; the smooth, deep curves and spirals of Maliphant’s choreography flickering.
But elsewhere the stage is shared with props that act out their own movement. Vortex is inspired by the paintings of Jackson Pollock, and the physical act of creating them. It opens with a lone man in front of a huge canvas which glows at his touch, but that canvas later becomes a steep slope – the dancers perched like birds on a roof – a rotating platform and a screen on which silhouettes are cast.
A huge piece of silk catches the air like a rippling, swirling sail. The giant arcs of Pollock’s paint flying on to canvas are echoed in the way a bucket hung from the ceiling swings in indiscriminate circles, the dancers gracefully lunging out of its way; or a sandbag cut open draws a spiral on the stage, sand falling like mist, then (with the help of a fan) billowing in clouds like a magical apparition, a will-o’-the-wisp.
They’re all ways of making energy and trajectory visible, giving shape to the electric charge in the air, just as Maliphant’s dancers do. It’s a company of young performers, including Paris Crossley, a popping specialist. She moves in a chain of short sentences each with a firm full stop, but rather than the explosive feel of hip-hop, here it’s filtered through a super-smooth slo-mo lens.
Even across contrasting scenes, the pulse and mood, and Katya Richardson’s piano score, keep to a mesmerically measured pace, which threatens monotony. There’s none of the verve, colour and urgency of Pollock’s paintings here, but that’s not the Zen of Maliphant.
At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 5 May. Then touring until 29 June.
