On Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant

'Push', a collection of four pieces performed by Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant (who choreographed them) flattered and disappointed as much as it delivered.  The opening night at the Sydney Opera House was the perfect example of a portmanteau program so patchy that a single answer to "Was it any good?" is hard to find.

There are moments of beauty that still move somewhere between my eyes and my brain, they are shapes or trajectories, movements that looked and felt perfect for an instant and in doing so sustained themselves long afterward.  At the same time so much seemed familiar and predictable.  Cliché is the enemy of art and in the trawl through familar tropes many stones were rolled and few left unturned.  

The program opens with Sylvie Guillem dancing a piece called 'Solo'.  There can be few more accomplished or starrier dancers and neither can there be many who control the whole theatre in a way where their craft speaks so much for them.

The classical flamenco guitar provides the perfect foil for her physical control and grace.  She leaves allows the Andalusian light and shade to permeate the piece so much so that still moments become a part of a one sided call and response.  Guillem is beautifully musical, there are moments where she underscores the crescendo of each staccato passage are so subtle that it takes a time or two to realise how she does it.  The second movement bathes her in a hard blue light and her limbs form arcs and tangents against the metronomic castanets.  There is a whole map of Iberian posture and gesture from both the corrida and flamenco, that these are never delivered in quotation marks,  but rather evoked and whispered is quietly accomplished.

The third piece, another Guillem solo, begins with a portentous high contrast cone of light and the dancer virtually vogueing to the bones of a techno beat.   It really does promise to be awful but almost imperceptibly and with incredible control Guillem increases the pace of her movement, still in that tight defined spotlight, and as she does the audience collectively forget to breath.  Guillem's dervish brilliance makes something sonically harsh stunningly beautiful.  The piece is highly technical like a hummingbird wing beat or an engine, but magic happens as she breaks in and out of the lit space at the front of stage in strobe of arms. It is very direct and gaspingly good. 

Russell Maliphant comes to the stage with no lack of dance credentials.  As the choreographer of all four pieces he has much to be proud of, but his first solo appearance in one of those modern dance uniforms of loose white linen is awfully underwhelming.  The piece, called 'Shift' is made worse partly because it is so obvious that its creators think it is so very clever.  Performed to a cello driven string quartet, an accompaniment that fights the industrial electro thrum for its place as dance's most predictable, this is a solo that begins almost as a slow workout.  Maliphant dances between and across a set of spotlights that cast up to three shadowed silhouettes of his posed body on the back wall, which is itself let to create layered sections.  The lighting effect is stagy but interesting but the performance is very mannered and without the effects is a pedestrian display of modern vogueing. 

The second half of the program, the eponymous 'Push', is the most problematic.  The beginning is arresting.  Guillem appears on Maliphant's back and shoulders in a series of poses, each one appearing and disappearing into total darkness.  As they appear they are fringed with a penumbra of light, their movements slow and controlled there is a sense of mystery and ritual present.  What follows is, for the most part, tremendously disappointing.  There are fewer moments of the kinetic sculpture created between the pair that the beginning promises.  Much of the time is spent in those with the pair circling one another in a stylized straight backed prowl, which is a standard modern dance cliché for some kind of emotional conflict.  With far too many of these lazy tropes and a score, by Andy Cowton, that is at times excruciating 'Push' manages to become really very boring despite its early peak.

Maybe the inconsistency between the acts in 'Push' allow us to appreciate the peaks all the better, although I'm sure that wasn't intentional.  'Push' succumbs to the current assumption that sombre slow portentous movement, discordant scores and chiaroscuro lighting equate with depth and artistry, the truth is light and shade can't hide the difference between good and bad.  Fortunately there was enough of the former here to justify coming.

On Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche

Akram Khan demands attention when he steps onto any stage.  His art, an ever innovative meeting of the kathak dance tradition and modern kineticism, is often beautiful and almost always compelling.  He has made collaboration the heart of his creation, just as he blends traditions he has found partners like Anthony Gormley, Nitin Sawnhey, Hanif Kureshi, Anish Kapoor and Sylvie Guillem who have been foils for the speed and tension of his choreography.

In-I is his show with Juliette Binoche and it arrives with all the fanfare of an 'important' cultural event, but little of the substance.  It is, at times reminiscent of a drama school warm up, a celebrity reality TV show and an idea fumbled with gimmicks.

It's best to start with the narrative, as this gives an sense of the show and explains why so much of it is so thuddingly literal.  It begins with two chairs and the flickering back projection that reminds us of a movie theatre.  Binoche is a girl in a cinema, in case we needed reminding where we knew her from, and she is watching Fellini's Cassanova (which is a feat of endurance in itself), she notices a man, chases him down, they fuck, set up home, break up and fight.  The problem with this is that the thoroughly predictable amour fou requires a pantomime of voice-over and mime that is often comically leaden. 

The intial consumation with its hints of sex in various positions sees a switch in the plane of the action, the pair are vertical but light projected onto the back wall give the illusion of us having a God's eye view.  As they wake on a sunlit bed the trouble starts.

The next phase is an extended mine of domestic scenes, smoking, fucking, pissing, wiping.  The language is important, you sense a students (or conceptual artist's) excitement at low level shock as the pair mime their way through all the ciphers and clichés of an unravelling relationship.  It really, really looks like a drama class.  The piece finally breaks into a brief solo by Khan, recognisable in its speed and grace as his arms create frightening orbits around his body, the moment of abstraction and the relief from the narrative is welcome.

It is of course Juliette Binoche who is supposed to be the crowd-puller, and deny it as we might much of that appeal is the 'can she, can't she' spectacle of an actor dancing.  That celebrity dance show voyeurism is hugely distracting and whilst Binoche proves to be able one can't quite shake off the sense that the dancing isn't the thing, and that's why we have so much cloth eared narration and clownish mime.  There's a vast chasm between Binoche and the tensile dynamism of Khan's normal dancers, and that void is sadly apparent.

To say that there is nothing here to delight us in the work is churlish, the final duet approaches on the lyrical and there are moments of charm at the beginning.  However the heavy seriosity, the self-consciousness and the bad prose are hard to forgive.  This is disappointing as my tickets were bought months ago, months spent on tenterhooks.  Works like Kaash, zero degrees and Sacred Monsters have been among my favourite experiences in a theatre, but we ought not to judge a work on accumulated kudos.

It is a shame.

Some cultural collaborations are, like Ronald Biggs and The Sex Pistols or anyone with Bono are so  squirmingly pointless that they often transgress common decency.  Of course there are two clear causes why otherwise credible (and I exclude Bono from that description) artists.  The first is greed, the way the imagined spoils of a potential 'crossover' audience robs the artistic institutions that put these collaborations on robs them of their critical faculties.  The second is ego.  Just as George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have said, during a Hollywood meeting, "The trouble is, Mr Goldwyn, that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money", 'popular' artists seek the patina of critical credibility of 'high culture' artists who, at the same time, seek the opiate of the others' fame.  

It isn't enough for Sydney to be grateful when graced by global names, in the interest of standards we have to be honest when we see the shark being jumped, even when it's by feet as starry as these.

On Morphoses

There may never be many posts on Artkritique that concern dance.  Despite my fascination, indeed seduction, by contemporary dance I feel a lack of language, an absence of knowledge that places my experience and response in any kind of context.  Perhaps that's a good thing.

Morphoses, the company of superstar choreographer (as much as such a thing exists I suppose) Christopher Wheeldon arrived at the Sydney Festival with a critical fanfare as a saviour of modern dance.  Of course messiahs have an uncomfortable habit of turning out to be false, and in this case I failed to feel the get the religion.  The program was made up of four parts, the first 'Commedia' a work for the full company who appear as though ready for a Venetian masque, all primary cloaks, lace ruffs and harlequin lycra, to Stravinsky's 'Pulcinella Suite'.  The reference to the Commedia dell'Arte is only tutu deep and feels a little too pleased with itself.  This is the problem in a piece that felt too long, the ear to ear smiles of the dancers and the archness of pose make 'Commedia' feel like a camp pastiche, too knowing without being terribly smart, a candy confection dressed in a glib reference.  It was not a good start.

Had the second work been as arch I would have left at the interval, but luckily 'Slingerland Pas de Deux' was the most controlled and concentrated part of the evening, beautifully intimate and economical.  The piece emerges from the dark, a man and woman, in flesh toned costumes partially lit joined together in a penumbra.  As the woman weaves around the man their hands hardly part, their bodies often in tension a perfect counterpoint to one another.  If movement has a tone here it is an almost perfect echo the the profound ache of cello in Gavin Bryars' 'String Quartet Number One'.  This feels how most moving of dance feels, where muscle emotes and movement is eloquent the work is a perfect vignette of passion and need.

After the interval comes a piece called 'Distant Cries', again a duet.  Beginnning silently it strikes a more modern note.  Always graceful it evokes a private passion, of the unarticulated space between people and their efforts to cross it.  

The final piece, 'Fools Paradise' begins with a trio bathed in an expressionist cone of light and a dusting of petals, loose limbed and rapturous their movement is punctuated, like intakes of breath, by more rigid recognisably classical poses.  But this tender lyricism becomes increasingly portentous and fails to find its natural close.  In the end it feels terribly long and quite self indulgent.

The overwhelming sense one leaves with is that Wheeldon and his dancers are at their best in these smaller and more intimate pieces, the duets were highpoints.  There is something astonishing that can happen between a pair of dancers when light, sound and their bodies find the language of a moment.  Here they seem less arch and artful, the experience is direct and heady, perhaps the choreographer is liberated from the need to use all the toys and techniques at his disposal, and just reaches toward us with his art.