Russell Maliphant & Sylvie Guillem - PUSH
Sadler's Wells, London

Shirley Dent
posted 26 June 2006

It was the night England played Trinidad and Tobago, awaiting a win that would put them through to the next stage of the World Cup. A feeling was abroad that we could be on the verge of an SNE (shared national experience). I ended up having an SBE - shared ballet experience - instead.

The pairing of Rusell Maliphant and Sylvie Guillem is simply great art at its best and everyone sitting in the Sadler's Wells theatre knew this - when confronted with the Taj Mahal you don't need an A - Z to tell you that you are in the presence of something extraordinary. This is the sort of dance that turns disbelievers into modern dance proselytisers and philistines into ravenous culture vultures.

Russell Maliphant's choreography does two things that transport an audience: it gets you in the gut and it gets you in the head. Maliphant is at his most cerebral when he is at his most physical and visceral. In Sylvie Guillem he has found a dancer who is perfectly attuned to the intellectual and physical challenge of his choreography.

There were no new works on the bill at Sadler's Wells - all four pieces had been previously performed - but that did not stop the audience rising as one ecstatically at the end of each work. This choreography has an inbuilt power continually to surprise.

Solo, the first and in someways the lightest work in mood, intensity and tone, is a tour de force for Guillem's technique: every movement as precise as a pin-tack, as strong as a bullet and as fluid as quick silver. Guillem's other solo, Two, is transfixing. The space in which she can move is delineated by a square of light that she explores slowly and deliberately at first, flexing those extraordinary limbs. Then Andy Cowton's soundtrack 'kicks in' (as the brochure says) and she begins to possess that space, slicing up the air with scimitar movements until she seems to be eating air with her limbs.

Maliphant's own solo, the acclaimed Shift, is far more cerebal and intense, a multiplication of the self through the shadow play of Michael Hulls' lighting and the discipline of Maliphant's choreography. This is an extremely clever piece but also one I find chokingly emotional. In an age when making something of yourself so often means making a show of yourself Maliphant multiplies his presence, becomes more than himself by not showing off, by subsuming himself utterly to lighting and a musical score that requires precise line and intelligent strength. He is dictated to by the physical realities of light and sound but he dictates back to the physical world, literally transforming his physicality, multiplying, enlarging, diminishing and distorting his image.

The pas de deux, Push, that ended the programme couples both Guillem's and Maliphant's outstanding technical abilities with the intellectual rigour and experimentation of Maliphant's choreography. What Maliphant understands is that dance depends not just on freedom of movement and mind but on resistance and contraries. This is physically true, as the name Push suggests: it is the tensions and torsions between Guillem and Maliphant that gives power and momentum to their movement as they meld into one or pull each other apart. This is Newton's laws of motion made art.

The importance of resistance, struggle and connection with the world external to the dancer in Maliphant's choreography also works at an intellectual level. Maliphant's dance really comes into its own in ensemble work, whether that is pas de deux or trios (as in Broken Fall), because it allows a fundamental exploration of one individual's relationship with another and how this relationship transforms the totality of that individual as the evolving relationship is manifested in front of us. When Maliphant first enters with Guillem aloft on his shoulders it is as is they have cleaved together as one giant entity. As they begin their duet, Guillem enveloping and mirroring Maliphant's limbs and torso, it is as if they are vein-in-vein, flesh-in-flesh to each other. But of course they do pull apart and it is the constant and concentrated, tender and intense, flow between the assertion of individuality and subsuming of individuality into something and someone else that concentrates not just the heart but the mind as well. It is transcendence grounded and manifest in the real and physical.

Physically and philosophically this dynamic and riveting dance argues that the greatest leaps of human transcendence are achieved through a great sense of the ground.

Run over.