| The association between super star étoile Sylvie Guillem and choreographer and dancer Russel Maliphant continues to produce masterpieces of strength and pure poetry. Each of their ten year’s worth of experience in classical and contemporary dance combined in 2003 when the dancers produced “Broken Fall” for the Covent Garden Dance Company with the Royal Ballet. Guillem’s extraordinary physical qualities and Maliphant’s experience with yoga, contact improvisation and T’ai chi join in such productions, which are marked by a continuous and fast instability, together with a sculptural definition and a sophisticated rhythmical sensibility. |  |
Sylvie Guillem, Russel Maliphant – Emilio Corti
The association between super star étoile Sylvie Guillem and choreographer and dancer Russel Maliphant continues to produce masterpieces of strength and pure poetry. Each of their ten year’s worth of experience in classical and contemporary dance combined in 2003 when the dancers produced “Broken Fall” for the Covent Garden Dance Company with the Royal Ballet. Guillem’s extraordinary physical qualities and Maliphant’s experience with yoga, contact improvisation and T’ai chi join in such productions, which are marked by a continuous and fast instability, together with a sculptural definition and a sophisticated rhythmical sensibility.
The Teatro degli Arcimboldi in Milan recently featured a breathtaking, sold out program by the couple, including the individual pieces: “Solo,” “Shift,” “Two” and the new “Push,” which set on fire a heterogeneous audience. Sylvie enters in “Solo” with a proud majesty under the rarefied and hypnotic geometry of red lights designed by Michael Hulls and against the flamenco notes of Carlos Montoya. She moves in a firework of arms and feet, and with a breathtaking sense of line. The Spanish music perfectly suits the movements of a proud and earthly femininity, and this emotional experience is strong and continuous from the first moment. The piece concludes in blue lights, shifting to a more melancholic mood.
“Shift” is a duet between Russel Maliphant and his own shadow, projected and multiplied by Michael Hulls’ genial design. It is a masterpiece of concentration, intimacy and discipline rooted in Maliphant’s interest in yoga and T’ai chi. The contradiction between Sylvie’s astonishing, elusive femininity and his apparition, bound to the floor and developed in more minimal movements, is strong, and confers the larger program with a sense of completeness.
“Two,” originally created for Dana Fouras and completely redesigned for Guillem’s unique body, is one of Maliphant’s best creations to date. The dancer begins the piece inside of a cage of lights. Set against a slow rhythm and a drop in the silence, she conveys a palpable sense of constraint, of impatient imprisonment. Her body moves hypnotically. It becomes totally abstract; shape, light and movement combine, creating a series of mutating silhouettes, barely human, which could refer to Surrealism itself through the black abstraction of her back and arms. The meditative and suffering mood changes as Andy Cowton’s music shifts to rock patterns accompanied by fireworks of her feet and arms. The piece is thus transformed by light and sound into moving flames. Here, the choreography seems to swallow her body whole as she evaporates into light and motion. She is literally driving the audience mad.
“Push,” for Guillem and Maliphant on the other hand, is a romantic, soft but acrobatic piece produced originally in 2005 by London’s Sadler’s Wells. The choreographer’s concept was to create a study of the need for all things to push and to move, a continuous shift of pushes and reactions entirely devoid of gravity. The dancers’ bodies thus fall with freedom, providing a complex dynamism to the entire piece. It is a carillon of images, of sculptural poses mindful of the dancers’ classical histories. It is pure poetry in motion—a flood of the remembrances of adolescence, death, Etruscan statues, the imagery of evolution from animal to human, and accompanied by a discovery of the other’s body through a glance. Then comes the wonder, the contact and the “push.” Here is the love fight and the love play. Continuous, this is an endless sequence of sensual connections marked by the contrast between her airy moves and his, as more bound to the ground. The dance’s end is sublimely pathetic, sculptural. It is pure humanity where everything else is erased from memory. Finally, the whole world is reduced to the two dancers upon the stage.
