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

Lighting design is very much the poor relation when it comes to reviews of dance and ballet. Choreography, characterisation, sets, costumes may all get a mention. Lighting, when it’s mentioned, is often only in a negative sense – for instance the gloom preferred by Forsythe means that its very difficult to identify individual dancers on stage even if you know who they are. Recent performances both by Russell Maliphant / George Piper Dances and by Ballet Preljocaj demand a rather different approach though: in both cases the lighting design and effects are a part of the work, though in rather different ways.

Russell Maliphant was at the Place last week in a program which included two of his earlier duets and a new piece, Torsion, made for Nunn and Trevitt of George Piper Dances. Maliphant's work is very intense, compressed, intimate, tightly worked. In Knot Maliphant dances with Yuval Pick: it had a formal, ritual affair as if a preparation for combat. His work has acquired greater currency by featuring in the George Piper repertoire; the language has become familiar from their Critical Mass – the transfer of weight between individuals, leaning, twisting, balancing against one another, testing out the possibilities of how two bodies interact. It is very pared down, tightly focussed approach. Lighting is used very specifically to box the dancers in, to define where they move, and lead them around the performance area.

In Sheer, a duet with Dana Fouras, the lighting is even more the driver of the work: it begins very slowly, the dancers illuminated from behind. The silhouettes are used to very deliberately examine the shape of an arm, the extension of a leg. Light again moves the dances around the stage. Sheer was a remarkably tender piece. How does he achieve this ? There is nothing overtly romantic or even affectionate about it, but the calm interaction of the two of them – falling backwards towards each other, bracing themselves against each other – seemed to speak volumes about quiet trust and confidence.

Torsion begins with Nunn and Trevitt imprisoned it seems in separate squares of light while their arms zoom around at frantic pace, before being released into increasingly demanding interplay with one another, with some very ambitious lifts. At first sight this didn’t seem as convincing a work as Critical Mass. However, Torsion may have suffered in coming as the third item on the bill: Maliphant’s work has such a very distinct and powerful flavour that it might be preferable to see this as part of a mixed bill, offset by some other styles.

In all these works, the light was a key element, a fully integrated part of the work as a whole, which just wouldn’t be the same or make sense (particularly Sheer) without it. There were some extraordinarily striking lighting effects on show at Ballet Preljocaj’s performance at Sadlers yesterday. But though these were spectacular, it seemed to me that these dominated the dance rather than served it.

The work was Helikopter, which Preljocaj made to a work by Stockhausen – a string quartet played in four separate helicopters, complete with engine noise etc…..if you like your dance musical this was not the work for you. The ‘Video scenic director’ for this was Holger Forterer. The effects were extremely clever: the floor under the dancers feet was transformed as if to a shallow pond in which their feet were splashing, or a like a kind of wind tunnel effect where movement caused lines of light behind them to ripple and distort: or the effect of rotating rotor blades. A huge mirror reflected the dancers (at least it did for the stalls – in the second circle it could barely be seen). In fact its much easier to remember the effects rather than the steps themselves. The dancers worked hard, but there was little sense of any personality being allowed to intrude, and much of the movement began to get very repetitive.

Here although the effects were fabulous, with the dancers seeming to call every effect into being by their movement, ultimately the union of dance and effects seemed unequal and unbalanced. Without the effects, the dance might look rather pedestrian and repetitive: under it, it was simply submerged.. The rather sparse but vocal audience (which nevertheless included many dancers and plenty of the dance establishment) nevertheless liked it a lot.

Also on the bill was Preljocaj’s Rite of Spring – more to follow on that separately.