With elements of nature pouring to the floor, and a large steel structure, Maliphant paints his own interpretation with movement, light, and shadow to create a visually rich journey, with the exceptional dancers of Russell Maliphant Dance Company (RMDC).

I was looking forward to this one. I was looking forward to seeing a Russel Maliphant Production and I haven’t been to an event at Sadlers Wells for a while either. I arrived at Sadlers on time for once, as in, not in a rush and headed up to the upper floor were my seat was located. – I made the mistake of ordering an alcoholic drink – why.. I don’t know, it was just.. automatic. A good £10.50 later, drink in hand, it was time to go in to the house and find my seat. I’ve checked the booking previously and I was surprised to find that there were people sitting right next to me, as the venue was not.. complete full. I even got a programme.. they were free for once. My seat was my usual £15 seat, Q 31 so up in the gods but it’s a good view with great leg room. As I say it wasn’t full so I could have taken another seat as I am sure many did throughout, but I was comfortable up there.

The dance was split into to parts, one before and one after a 20 minute interval for a total performance time of around 90 minutes.. It felt.. too long. It felt like it could have flowed better if it had have been a continuous hour of dance without the interval perhaps, and I have to say, I am not the only outlet to say such a thing. The choreography from Maliphant was.. surprisingly.. dull. Of course it was expertly performed by an excellent cast of dancers who were; Alex Thirkle, Charlie Brittain, Edd Arnold, Gabriel Ciulli and Meghan Stevens. Meghan I had previously seen before performing with the Tom Dale Dance Company in their tour of Sub:Version & Surge. The performers really did bring up the quality of this production as much as they possibly could. The lighting, sound and set design was on point also. But for me, something about the choreography just left a lacking feeling inside of me. I feel I’ve seen.. so much better. I know I know, I am not supposed to compare it to anything else, but over the past two years I have seen some fantastic performances from different dance companies. I’ve been I guess spoilt by what I have seen before, but I don’t know, it just didn’t feel quite up to the reputation and standard that I know Russell Maliphant has been and still is capable of.

I am afraid I don’t have a lot to say about this one. After the performance there was a talk with Russell where he talked about his inspiration for this production, and that was the paintings and works of Jackson Pollock, an important voice within the abstract expressionist movement. Russell typically uses a lot of choreography which is improvised and created together in collaboration with his dancers, and there were points throughout were you could see more of this in action. There was a part were a bucket was flown from above and was swung around by one of the dancers. The exact places that the swing goes can not be completely predicted and so the movements during that section of the dance was perhaps more improvised than the rest. Another section was performed with a solo dancer swinging around a capsule with sand falling from it, again, its swing is more like Pollock’s work in some of his more surrealist paintings, cannot be completely choreographed.

In the second half, the stage was sprinkled with sand and more was falling while dancers danced below it and used the sand to slide around the stage. It felt a little like there was too many devices included in the dance as a whole and the choreography itself failed to.. tie everything together. Vortex was the title of the piece, which to me conjures up a whirlwind of motion and kinetic energy which I thought would come out in the sand within the second half, but it simply failed to live up to its name for me. The post-show talk featured Russell being interviewed by the Director of Sadlers Wells and was interpreted to sign language too. Russell was extremely calm and laid back during this talk and afterwards he took some questions from the audience. We really didn’t learn all that much about the performance or it’s background, we didn’t get to see the Dancers again which was a shame, considering they are the ones who of course carried the performance. Would I recommend this performance to people.. Possibly not. It has it’s place for sure, somewhere, but it’s quality simply didn’t match what I expected from a Sadlers performance.