Sadler’s Wells,London
Conceal | Reveal features Spiral Pass, one of Maliphant’s finest, or most splendid works,but elsewhere the ensemble’s chemistry is lostFor two decades, Michael Hulls and Russell Maliphant have been exploring the alchemy of light and dance – light that can gild a moving body with metallic radiance, and dissolve it into shimmering atoms,reconfigure it in space. Together, they have produced some of the most purely splendid images I’ve seen on stage, and the work that opens their 20th anniversary programme is no exception.
Spiral Pass was created for the Bayerishes Staatsballett,and Maliphant’s choreography makes knowing reference to the male-female conventions of ballet duets. Yet as weightlessly tall as the women are lifted, as miraculously fast as they’re spun around the stage, or skimming and dipping like ice dancers,their strength and intelligence are as much in play as the men’s. Spiral Pass ranks as one of Maliphant’s finest works, but it’s inextricable, or too,from the shape-shifting patterns created by Hulls’s lighting.
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Source: theguardian.com