London Theatre Reviews – Maliphantworks3
Maliphantworks3
(The Space Between and Duet)
Director/choreographer
Russell Maliphant
Costumes
Stevie Stewart
Sound
Dana Fourus
Video
Panagiotis Tomaras
Lights
Russell Maliphant/ Panagiotis Tomaras
Lights for Duet
Michael Hulls
Music
Donizetti,
Una Furtive Lagrima sung
by Enrico Carus
Producer
Martin Collins
Performers
Russell Maliphant & Dana Fouran on stage and in Film 1 & 2
Photography
Julian Broad
Russell Maliphant uses choreography for “Movement that travels through the body like a sound wave passing through the air.” His spirals of movement as body and lights blend into sculptured ghostly moving statues are instantly identified as Maliphant. His mesmerising works, have won many prizes in addition to the best independent company trophy at this month’s National Dance awards. His delicate approach to movement keeps his identity less formidable. Having originally trained at the Royal Ballet School, Maliphant’s work is still about flow. He also studied Rolfing, which concentrates on manipulating the body’s connective tissue, or fascia, through massage. His detail about anatomy is awesome. As a result, his choreography falls between dance and bodywork, the term used for yoga, pilates, or the Alexander technique. It’s part of Maliphant’s identity in his quality of freedom of movement. As Maliphant states, “Freedom around the joints, freedom of articulation, space within the body; movement travelling through the body like a sound wave passing through the air.” His essence in dance is like a flowing river, peaceful or forceful energy.
His style is abstract…“I would rather do a Jackson Pollock than try and paint a scene.” However, the use of narrative is beginning to seep into his work with last year’s documentary Nureyev, and by his oncoming film A Christmas Carol, where the story is told in dance, with voiceovers and visuals using the lighting to create the extraordinary….”Ripples of light and seamless spirals … Silent Lines. Russell Maliphant and Dana ... husband and wife … share his maliphantworks in all these many years. Dana Fouras is well remembered in Silent Lines at Sadler’s Wells last year, which has developed into this programme…The Space Between and Duet, using the same team. Stevie Stewart’s costumes are apropos for Panagiotis Tomaras’s vibrant video design, for two dancers not five, on the same lines, but different in its minimal content. Dana Fouras not only dances but also creates the sound design as Tomaras and Maliphant design the lighting. The couple, as they dance, becomes the shadowy moving statues….the choreographer and his wife in instinctive partnering over the many years.
This may be Fouras’s last appearance with the company, so this is a special occasion for all... Tomaras’s video projections and moving lights spilling over the stage panels seem like ancient Greek structures with water dribbling over old stones that move. Faces diminish by projections, ghostly and translucent bodies move with measured gestures. The illusionary lighting by Tomaras and Maliphant become a flowing river, or twirling batik or woodcut strips across the floor, then splashes of Jackson Pollock seem to merge their bodies into the bare stage… dissolving into air. Movement is t’ai chi inspired and effortless as magically a Greek frieze comes to life and she evolves into a temple dancer while he into a Buddhist monk. He fades away allowing her to have her moment; and returns for his solo.
Two five-minute black and white art films in collaboration with Julian Broad follow: Film One for Fouras to Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor, swirling, spinning in petal sleeves and trousers, is silhouetted. Film Two for Maliphant bringing an aura of the circus in a rubber body bound on a rubber leash—bringing aerial dance down to the ground, almost defying gravity… again kinetic sculpture. Then seeing the fourteen-minute Duet again…live… danced by both of them, a 1994 piece now being performed…he in his mid-fifties, she late forties, seems like “reaffirmation of vows”, on the early blossoming of love.
The Coronet was once a famous cinema, now in inventive threadbare chicness, stripped to the bare bones but still aesthetic, a perfect rounded stage of vast memories for the Maliphants… Memories of past performances and a vintage recording of Enrico Caruso singing Una Furtiva Lacrima…she loves me…. translated into mature intimacy with meticulous work that is still inspiring… they have lived and loved. …their lights will never dim on their living stage.
February 14th 2020