Natalia Osipova and Sergei Polunin are a golden couple, dancers of rare individual talent whose offstage love affair brings a startling extra wattage to their onstage partnership. But they are also restless, looking for identities outside ballet, and this new triple bill of contemporary dance, commissioned by Osipova, gives some inkling – if not a complete revelation – of where that restlessness might lead.
It’s choreographer Arthur Pita who makes the boldest use of the couple. Run Mary Run is a dark, sweet, trashy story of doomed love, powered by a soundtrack from 1960s girl group the Shangri–Las. Osipova, with an auburn beehive, and Polunin in jeans and leather jacket, are funny and poignant as they embody the hormone rush of the couple’s first kisses, riding the live-fast, die- young trajectory of drink, drugs and sex. There’s a precise period wit to their jive-inflected moves (especially the dance with the shot glass and cigarette): and while Polunin is predictably sexy as the poster bad boy, Osipova is more unexpectedly heartbreaking as the teenage sweetheart who falters and sags with the dissolution of her dreams.
In Silent Echo, Russell Maliphant places the couple on more familiar ground, combining the structure of the classical pas de deux with dance of fluid sensuality and heft. It opens to shifting pools of brightness in which Osipova and Polunin float insubstantially around each other. Spun into closer orbit, their final duet is made climactic by vertiginous lifts that topple and melt; and if Osipova finds a more natural affinity with the Maliphant style, it’s moving to see Polunin engage so seriously with its challenges.
Silent Echo is a fine piece, although it’s unfortunately too close in style to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Qutb, a trio in which Osipova dances with two other men (James O’Hara and Jason Kittelberger). There are outstanding moments – lifts in which her exceptional suppleness and strength create the illusion that she’s walking, flying or hovering over her partners’ bodies – but they leave us hungry to see more of what Osipova, and Polunin, might achieve.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 3 July. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
