Russell Maliphant may attract big-name collaborators — Sylvie Guillem, Robert Lepage, BalletBoyz — but his work is as unshowy as they come.
His choreographic universe is unique: repeatedly he has returned to the idea of how bodies and light interact, mixing the precision of ballet with the abstraction of modern dance and the combative flow of martial arts. His best works carry the power to transport and hypnotise; with lighting director Michael Hulls, he has created some of contemporary dance’s most arresting sequences.
Silent Lines — a lean 60-minute exploration into two of Maliphant’s other interests, anatomy and biomechanics — carries these trademarks. It starts as a display of Panagiotis Tomaras’s shimmering video projections; five dancers, just discernible in the gloom, arch and fall as one, bodies softened by the flowing water beamed on to them. But though light is essential to this piece — sculpting muscles, directing steps — then so too is shadow, and with quiet confidence Maliphant plunges much of the stage into almost total darkness.
It creates some striking images, notably a solo in which Grace Jabbari — who seems less to be dancing Maliphant’s choreography than inhabiting it — turns slowly on the spot, arms aloft, seemingly mesmerised by a whirlpool beamed at her feet.
A light fantastic.
