Sadler's Wells, London
Age can be cruel to dancers. To classical dancers, in particular, for whom performing is often a brutal struggle against nature. The human body is not designed for ballet. It has to be modified, joint by joint, muscle by muscle, and thereafter maintained in its artificial state. And if this process is allowed to slip, even for a day, nature begins to reassert itself. It's a battle that, ultimately, cannot be won, as even the great Rudolf Nureyev found to his cost when he tried to extend his performing career into his 50s.
Historically, women have fared better than men in this respect, but over the age of 40 even the most self-denying ballerina is dancing on borrowed time. Sylvie Guillem, the French-born prodigy who launched her career under Nureyev's directorship at the Paris Opera Ballet, is now 46. Physically, with her long, slender limbs and her extraordinary flexibility and strength, Guillem has always had what many would consider the perfect balletic instrument. And it has been rigorously maintained, as is evident from her latest programme, in which she performs specially commissioned works by choreographic veterans William Forsythe and Mats Ek.
The best comes first. Rearray, by Forsythe, has been created for Guillem and Parisian star Nicolas Le Riche, who is 40 next year. Set to a score by American composer David Morrow, the piece sees the pair engage and disengage in a complex and unceasing interplay of forms. Classical ballet is clearly the source of their dance-language, but where ballet presents a series of formal photographic moments, Forsythe gives us something much more organic. This is ballet exploded from within, so that arms become airily whirling tendrils, extending from a physical core that is itself in constant motion, and legs probe the side-lit darkness like antennae.
Morrow's composition, a nervy layering of strings, seems to whisper and sigh like the wind at a broken window, and Rachel Shipp's wave-form lighting sees the dancers alternately picked out in clear, watery silver and dissolving into a wash of black. Time and formal structure seem to dissolve with them. We see flashes of familiar danse d'�cole, with attitudes and arabesques briefly struck, and flickers of formal batterie, but these have a vestigial, half-remembered air, and quickly morph into more exotic forms. If there is a relationship between the two performers, it is an entirely abstract one. At times they luxuriate in shared space, impelled by the same restless torsion, at others they fly apart like dragonflies.
If Rearray is an austere and perhaps even astringent spectacle, it is a profoundly beautiful one. Both Guillem and Le Riche have sublime plastique, that coalescence of softness, flexion and tempered steel that gives movement its flow. Forsythe understands, perhaps better than any other living choreographer, how to play off this quality. And as he overlays his dancers again and again with darkness, drenching them in the music's neurotic tristesse, you sense his profound admiration. For the way ? like ballet itself ? that Guillem and Le Riche continue to evolve, to cut to the essence, to create beauty out of entropy.
After this it's something of a jarring leap to Jiri Kylian's 27' 52". Created in 2002, this features Aur�lie Cayla and Kenta Kojiri, whose virtuosity and sincerity fail to save the piece from its conceptual vacancy. There's some extended business in which, to an electronic score by Dirk Haubrich (apparently, although not obviously, based on themes by Mahler), the dancers conceal themselves beneath the floor-cloth and Cayla, for no particular reason, removes her red shirt and dances bare-breasted. There are angsty exchanges, tic-ridden moves and, inevitably, a silent scream. The piece reminded me, quite forcefully, of Antonioni's 1995 film Beyond the Clouds. Both combine semi-nudity and pseudo-existentialism to hopelessly kitsch effect; both were created by well-established artists long switched to autopilot.
Something of a relief, then, to switch to Mats Ek's Bye. This opens with some tricksily cute cutting between film of Guillem and the dancer herself. Ek's designer, Katrin Br�nnstr�m, has costumed Guillem in an oddly assorted outfit of cardigan, blouse, skirt and socks. On anyone else it would appear dowdy; on Guillem it's quirkily chic. Her movements are stereotypical: now puppet-like, now crazily purposeful. She may be a frustrated suburban matron; she may be that archetypal Ek heroine, the long-term, institutionalised mental patient. At intervals, she seems to recall a childhood dream of dancing, and launches into a sensuously high kick or snappy turn. More than once, she balances on her head. The piece is touching, but too self-consciously whimsical to be truly poignant. Unlike the figure of Guillem herself. There's that extraordinary body, with its racy, sinewy lines. And the face, touched with the knowledge that one day, all of this will have to end. But not yet.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jul/10/sylvie-guillem-6000-miles-away
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