'Knot' reviews 'Sheer' reviews 'Torsion' reviews Fouras in reviews Nunn in reviews recent Maliphant Co reviews recent George Piper reviews

It was left till last, however, and by then Maliphant and his regular partners, Yuval Pick and wife, Dana Fouras, had stolen the programme at The Place with its first two works Knot and Sheer. Sheer is Maliphant’s craft at its most sublime. The complicity between he and Fouras means they know the terrain of each other’s body – its palpitation and stillness - blind. Their gaze rarely meets to break its spell. At first their arms communicate through a majestic Chinese shadow play across the space between them that seems viscous like treacle. Gradually they breach it, intertwining in a slow rotation propelled by inexorable arcs of their limbs. The score by Sarah Sarhandi quietly accumulates a tension that eventually leaks out in the soft cry of the viola. And the dancers negotiate it impeccably. Sometimes cradling each other to the ripple of their own deep currents sometimes overlapping with its emotion in poignantly unaccentuated lifts. They are an enigmatic couple who reveal their intimacy and yet give nothing away.

Maliphant is a master of feline restraint. The clarity of his arms movements originate in a torso finely tuned and alert like a predator. Michael Hull’s lighting designs marry exquisitely with the movement. In these days when many choreographers look to high technology to enhance the dancing body, Maliphant’s reliance on the simplicity of electric light shows that less is often more.

In Knot the arms become pendulums, marking the uneasy rhythm of a ritualistic sparring. Pick and Maliphant are like legionnaires in brown sackcloth, louche and brooding under a desert sun. Coiled with latent violence and brotherly love, they idly hone their bodies as languid pedestrian movement erupts into quick fire combat, chilling in its precision and control.

The long-awaited Torsion had Trevitt and Nun’s arms scything the air like helicopter blades. Maliphant’s movement palette, culled from capoeira and contact improvisation, moulds itself perfectly on their virtuosic bodies and becomes more athletic with the odd tour en l’air that could have been developed further to showcase the pair’s skill. What they lack, though, is the cool interiority and effortless rapport of Maliphant’s dancers. They seem slightly at a loss onstage when not actually ‘dancing’. They also draw more attention to their external appearance so that the opening section, with Maliphant’s trademark pools of light sculpting their biceps, had the air of ‘voguing’ on a podium in their sleeveless French Connection denim. The whole thing was slightly more Robocop than martial arts. Their duet was gruellingly physical, with Nunn at one stage pointing Trevitt’s taut body at the audience like a canon. The duo’s charming grin during the curtain calls provided a pleasant antidote.