Review: Russell Maliphant’s Maliphantworks4 – “I could watch it repeatedly, week-after-week.”

In these troubled times, even a brief evening of Russell Maliphant‘s dance is a perfect prescription to cleanse the soul. This pair of solos lasted a total of just 45 minutes (plus a fifteen-minute interval), and the time flew by. It was an exact repeat of the programme held in these atmospheric surroundings of Notting Hill’s Coronet Theatre just last March, but frankly I could watch it repeatedly, week-after-week.  

A major theme of Maliphant’s work has always been the interaction of light and bodies in movement and this double bill of new(ish) and older work showcased the best of the two lighting designers that have shared his repertoire, beginning with In A Landscape, the latest in a recent line of Maliphant’s work with Athenian video and light artist, Panagiotis Tomaras: an earlier iteration, Silent Lines (2019) had the dancers seamlessly covered in his projections, which remained fixed to their bodies despite their range of movement. This was followed by one of Maliphant’s seminal and timeless works, Afterlight, made in 2009 to the superb, animated lighting designs of Michael Hulls.

In A Landscape opens with Maliphant taking a series of poses, each prepared under cover of darkness, like a slideshow of heroic photographic studies, holding the poses like Olympian statuary. Although technically a solo, Maliphant routinely dances alongside silhouettes of himself. Initially the shadows are cast far to the side of the Coronet’s small stage but – in one memorable central sequence – three images of Maliphant (one real, two reflected onto a long length of material hanging from the flies) are much more intimately associated.

Material holds an equal importance to lighting and Maliphant’s sculptured movement contrasts with differing textural fabric, all beigey-military-grey, thick and ruched like posh curtains in a stately home, or thinner and straight like cheaper blinds. Hanging (and dropping) the full height of the stage space, they form the landscape referenced in the work’s title. The constants are Maliphant’s fascinating presence, solid and strong but with soft, fluid movement and poses, and the rich electronic soundscape by his creative (and life) partner, Dana Fouras.

Afterlight was initially made for the In the Spirit of Diaghilev programme, commissioned by Sadler’s Wells to celebrate the centenary of the Ballets Russes and Maliphant chose to make a solo as an elegy to the form of Nijinsky, imagery created after close investigation of contemporary photographs of the legendary dancer. A big part of the Nijinsky legend is the growing schizophrenia that led him to become progressively detached from the world around him. Fleeting imagery of Nijinsky’s greatest roles (the faun and the rose amongst others) are engraved into the choreography.

The fifteen-minute work, in four sections that accord with Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes 1-4 (performed by Dustin Gledhill), was – and only ever has been – performed by Daniel Proietto (who won a National Dance Award in 2010 for this work). Frankly, it is impossible to imagine the work danced by anyone else.

By the way, Satie also suffered mental health issues and – if memory serves correctly – Maliphant had originally thought of commissioning a modern electronic score and it was only late in the day that he decided the Gnossiennes quartet to be perfect for the work. And it is.

Proietto spins uniquely, opening the work by turning slowly and so fluidly, that it seems he must be standing on a rotating platform. But it is plain that he is not, and the imperceptible, silky-smooth movements of his feet are covered by Hulls’ extraordinary lighting design. There is animation within the downwards lighting that sends pools of mottled patterns seeping out across the stage and then retracting. Proietto wears a beany hat and unremarkable loose clothing, designed by Stevie Stewart: there is a reason for this since the costuming never interferes with the impact of the animated light.

In much of his movement, Proietto turns circles in wide and narrow arcs, scything through the mottled floor patterns like a flashing blade, and this theme is continued in the smaller theatre at the Coronet with Film Two, a five-minute projection of Maliphant describing all sorts of circles while held in place by a giant rubber band (or perhaps, to be more accurate, bungee cord). In Film One, we were reminded of the exceptional dancing of Dana Fouras, as she performs a solo, also characterised by swirling and spinning, with a similar interplay of shadow and silhouette as In a Landscape. Both films are performed to the same hypnotic bouncing soundtrack, which although uncredited seems very like Andi Otto’s Bow Wave. Both films were made in collaboration with the photographer, Julian Broad.

This programme celebrated several perfect matches, including Maliphantworks and the Coronet Theatre, Afterlight and Daniel Proietto, and the thematic interplay of light and movement in Maliphant’s choreography. Can we have it again, next week, please?

Graham Watts

Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA).  He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.

He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv.  He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.