4* Review – The Telegraph – Maliphantworks3
© Julian Broad
The Coronet is a little, late-Victorian jewel of a theatre – with the most atmospheric bar in the known universe – 30 seconds’ walk from Notting Hill Gate tube station. The last time I was there (and this is, on all levels, far from a boast) the year was 1999, it was still a cinema, the terrifying horror film the Blair Witch Project was showing, and it was the last movie house in London in which you could still smoke.
Every time the increasingly lost trio in the film fumbled in panic for a cigarette (which they did often), all 200 of us in the auditorium tremblingly followed suit. On each occasion, for the next few minutes, you could barely see the screen for the Marlboro-induced miasma that hung between it and us, and the effect was ludicrously exciting.
Ciggies are of course verboten these days at the Coronet (a theatre now for the past six years), but the atmosphere that Russell Maliphant and co are currently generating there every evening is barely less palpable. For the third of his maliphantworks evenings in almost as many years – the previous two of which I’ve sadly been away for – he and his wife, the dancer and sound-designer Dana Fouras, are offering a 70-minute bill composed of four courses: the entrée of The Space Between, two short, palette-cleansing films (Film One and Two), and, as pud, the 12-minute Duet.
The most visually overwhelming of these by far is the first. It begins with Maliphant and Fouras curled up on the floor, as visual whizz Panagiotis Tomaras’s rippling projections bathe both them and the walls, but without, somehow, touching the floor. Gradually, with a very Maliphantian (and indeed Fourasian) sense of circularity, fluidity and perpetual motion, these two strange forms – more like large, luminous blobs of plasma than people – take on full human form as they stand up and gently interact.
Thereafter, with Fouras’s “score” further bathing the room in otherwordliness, the piece deliquesces from one movement to the next, with the couple soon appearing to walk on water, and Maliphant at one point moving so silently and smoothly across the floor that he genuinely seems to sink into it. All a bit meandering? Possibly. Entirely reminiscent of Maliphant and Pangiotis’s recent collaboration Silent Lines? Absolutely. And even, as Fouras serenely spirals in opposition to the shifting “waters” beneath her feet, a little giddy-making? That too. But, whether you approach it as an exquisitely lit dance show or a movement-filled light show, it is above all remarkably beautiful, and with Maliphant’s uniquely sculptural fingerprints all over it.
Those two post-interval films are of a certain interest but feel like fillers. The first, in which Fouras twirls in slow-motion in a billowing black dress, calls to mind Cunningham – not Merce, but Chris, and his 1998 video for Madonna’s song Frozen. The second sees Maliphant bob around on a bungee, achieving near-horizontal angles with the floor that he could never manage without the harness, if never quite shuffling off the sense that he’s somehow “cheating”.
Set to tinkered-about-with Donizetti, Duet is lovely. Lit by Maliphant’s longtime collaborator Michael Hulls with a starkness that contrasts totally with The Space Between, this is a pas de deux of easy, impossibly graceful intimacy between husband and wife, folding themselves around and over each other with a quiet but very real eroticism. And if, at 58, Maliphant can’t quite muster the physical elasticity of his pomp, he is still a pleasure to watch, while Fouras’s upper-body poetry is a thing of undimmed joy.