Russell Maliphant has recently become famous as the man who converts ballet stars to modern dance. It was his fiercely austere inventions that revealed a new Sylvie Guillem to the world, rerouting her classical dazzle into a vocabulary of transparent stillness and sheering attack. It was his viscerally intimate duets that helped William Trevitt and Michael Nunn transform themselves from Royal Ballet principals to chipper, experimental Ballet Boyz.
Yet the delirious reception currently being given to Maliphant's own company at the Wells makes it clear that his choreography can fill a theatre without the aid of prestige names. And his latest piece, Transmission, also makes it clear that Maliphant thrives most creatively when working with a permanent ensemble.
This all-female quintet is almost like a paean to collaboration, with choreography that seems to be transmitted, unbidden, between the dancers' collective nerve endings. At the beginning it manifests itself as tiny pinpricks of activity - a flickering of gestures caught in the beam of Michael Hulls' lighting and battling against the voices swirling through Mukul's electronic sound score. But the choreography, music and light then start to morph together through magical changes of mood and scale. The whole stage flattens as four of the dancers glide into contemplative duets, it is shattered by a trio of slicing turns and disruptive volleys of sound, it voyages into an epic journey of shadows, then just as it appears to reach an exhausted plateau the work concentrates back into a distillation of its original energy.
What's mesmerising about Transmission is the way it consecrates the mystery of the group - unifying the dancers into a cooperative entity that appears to operate by instinct and by exquisitely organised rules. It's a talent Maliphant has for getting at the secret heart of his performers and it is even more compellingly demonstrated in an untitled new solo for Alexander Varona.
Varona is a long, lean, liquid dancer. Yet the latter sharpens the edges of this beautiful body sculpture by forcing the dynamics between wary slowness and sudden pouncing speeds.
Varona is also the defining force in Push, a reworking of the duet Maliphant originally created for himself and Guillem. His rangier physique brings a more questing energy to the piece, while Julie Guibert is a more elastic and yielding partner than Guillem was to Maliphant. For a single duet to contain such different possibilities is proof, if any were needed, that Maliphant remains one of the most fertile choreographic minds working in Britain today.
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