Sylvie Guillem: 6,000 Miles Away at Sadler’s Wells

Sylvie Guillem: 6000 Miles Away at Sadler’s Wells, May 21

Sylvie Guillem in Mats Ek’s Bye (photo: Lesley Leslie-Spinks)

The evening of dance Sylvie Guillem was putting together in March 2011 might have been called simply ‘Sylvie Guillem and Friends’ if her rehearsals with William Forsythe in London had not coincided with the devastating tsunami that hit Japan. Calling the new program 6000 Miles Away was Guillem’s way of keeping in mind those who were suffering the effects of that environmental disaster (she raised £80,000 for the Red Cross Tsunami appeal at the original 2011 performances at Sadler’s Wells), but the title also neatly ties in with a charity Guillem supports, Sea Shepherd, among whose projects is the protection of whale habitats from the illegal practices of the Japanese whaling fleet. This in turn seems at least 6,000 miles from the playful, ecstatic image of Guillem on the publicity material under the names of three iconic choreographers, Jiří Kylián, William Forsythe and Mats Ek. Welcome to the world of Sylvie Guillem. She serves on the Media and Arts Advisory Board of Sea Shepherd and Sadler’s Wells this time round devoted an evening to fundraise for the charity, presenting a short filmed message from founding skipper Paul Watson, who could have been, yes, 6,000 miles away.

The attraction of the evening is indisputably Guillem herself, but she does not dance in all three works. It seems she commissioned Forsythe and Ek to make works for this program but the duet from Kylián’s 27’52” — in which Guillem does not dance — dates from 2002 and has no direct relation to her. Alistair Spalding’s welcome note in the program simply links the three works by stating that they showcase the work of ‘three creators who have held a special place in Sylvie’s career’ but Sarah Crompton in her article on the making of 6000 Miles Away makes no mention of Kylián at all. This suggests either that plans to commission Kylián to create a work for Guillem came to nothing, or that the duet from 27’52” — danced here by Aurélie Cayla and Lukas Timulak — was an afterthought.

As the curtain rises, Cayla and Timulak are on stage, she in a red top (later removed) and black pants standing in a spotlight and he lying in black pants and stripped to the waist at the edge of the floor. Lit beautifully by Kees Tjebbes, the stage is a clean canvas on which Kylián highlights with quiet precision the beauty of the articulated, semi-naked bodies in movement, something we can expect from him even when he is not at his most inspired. The problem is not with the choreography, nor with the dancing, nor with the score by Dirk Haubrich: the duet just doesn’t fit on the program; without Guillem’s creative involvement, it has an energy and identity at odds with the other two works, and deprives the evening of any unity.

Rearray is a duet of minimal form danced in and out of intermittent lighting conditions (Forsythe’s concept, Rachel Shipp’s realisation) that have an overly dominant role. There are so many blackouts, exits and entrances that the only way we recognize the end is when the dancers don’t come on again. When the lighting gets overly complex, one senses Rearray is a work that uses Guillem to show off Forsythe, but there are other luminous passages when Forsythe is clearly showing off Guillem. Dressed in t-shirt and jeans she performs what appears to be a series of relaxed, impromptu dances but has the ability to create starkly precise and beautiful shapes that seem to imprint themselves in the air. Her partner on this occasion, Massimo Murru, doesn’t have quite the same alchemy, which in a piece where partnering in the old sense is less in demand than an equality of presence keeps the equation one-sided. Forsythe gives him an arresting solo, however, in which his hands appear to be tied behind him, like a puppet unable to escape his own serfdom. David Morrow’s music is not an easy listen, but Forsythe evidently relishes its intricacy and in a lighter moment shares its humour: the fourth section begins as both dancers, facing upstage, simply bend their knees to the rhythm of Morrow’s score, creating a simple, articulated pattern that is both rich and quirky. Forsythe’s mastery of the stage remains undimmed, and it is a real joy to see Guillem responding to his direction even in a work that spends far too much time concealing her.

After the strong taste of Forsythe, Ek’s constant stream of ludic ideas in Bye is as refreshing as a sorbet. Ek, one feels, has put his choreography at the service of the artist, and Guillem returns his devotion in full. Katrin Brännström’s set is like a room with a small door in the back through which we see a black and white projection (thanks to Elias Benxon) of Guillem’s giant, cyclopic eye; the image of her face moves across the doorway/screen to reveal her other eye, then she walks away until she reaches stage size. Returning to peer through the glass, her real hands now appear over the doorframe as extensions of her filmed image. She is pigtailed, dressed in a yellow skirt, a green pullover and bobby socks (costumes by the ever-ingenious Brännström), a long-legged gamine playing games to her heart’s content. Erik Berglund’s lighting picks out both her line and the architectural elements beautifully, and enhances the playful colours of her costume. Ek uses the Arietta movement of Beethoven’s final piano sonata, op 111, shaping the rhythmic content and painting delightfully irreverent images that Guillem plays with her entire body as if on an instrument. Ek seems to derive his vocabulary from an array of sources including classical dance, yoga, everyday gestures and the sculptural forms of Henry Moore. As the sonata becomes more rhythmic and playful, so does Guillem, taking off her cardigan, shoes and socks, improvising as if in her own room like a clown or Raggedy Ann doll with her leg thrown nonchalantly up to her forehead. A man appears at the door looking in and glancing impatiently at his watch. How long will Guillem be? He goes away. She yawns, rolls over, and stands on her head. A virtual labrador comes to the door and sits down patiently, but eventually he, too, moves on. Guillem remains oblivious of time, bouncing to the luscious chords of the sonata with joyful abandon. Ek narrows our focus for a moment to the projected outlines of a bed on which Guillem lies. We concentrate on her hand gestures against the black and her form is like a goddess eating grapes, the pose from the poster. She stands on her head again, watched by a growing number of children at the door but finally puts on her socks and shoes. In the cadenza she dances a little madness before stepping outside and looking back wistfully at the interior world of her colourful imagination that she must regretfully leave to face the black and white reality outside.

Royal Ballet Flanders: Further inside the mind of William Forsythe

After publishing my review of William Forsythe’s Artifact (Inside the mind of William Forsythe, April 22), I got an email from Kathryn Bennetts with a comment about the curtain in Part 2. I had suggested that the curtain made too much noise, and that surely Forsythe would have wanted something less clumsy that did not detract from the music. Bennetts said she had received messages from people who had seen the original production, who complained the curtain did not come down loudly enough. Could this have been simply because the curtain in 1984 was controlled manually, or because Forsythe the enfant terrible was deliberately flouting theatrical convention (as he does elsewhere during the evening) to keep his audience off guard? If the latter, it reveals a deep seam of wit and conceit throughout the work. Interestingly, Clement Crisp loses patience with precisely this kind of conceit in his review of Artifact for the Financial Times (on.ft.com/I8B7LP).

Perhaps we should be careful not to take William Forsythe too seriously after all. Going back to that photographic portrait of him in the Sadler’s Wells program, isn’t there on that intelligent face the smile of a court jester?

Royal Ballet Flanders: Artifact (Inside the mind of William Forsythe)

Royal Ballet Flanders, William Forsythe’s Artifact at Sadler’s Wells, Saturday April 21.

There is a photograph of William Forsythe in the Sadler’s Wells program, a beautifully lit portrait in which his disembodied head and hands emerge from the darkness. If you take a quick glance at the portrait, he is smiling, welcoming; but if you focus on his left eye it is quite severe, dark, critical, and the right one shows love, forgiveness and humour. Focus on the smiling mouth, and it rises up at the right into the possibility of a smirk. What exactly is going on inside William Forsythe’s head at that moment?

In 1984, when Forsythe was given the direction of the Ballett Frankfurt, he created a new work for his company, which he called Artifact. It is a work about what was going on inside his head during that brief, three-week period of heightened creativity that was required to bring it out. The work is essentially a portrait, though of course it is created, edited, somewhat artificial. An artifact.

Part 1 of this ballet in four parts opens with the enigmatically named The Other Person (first soloist Eva Dewaele) appearing in a procession of one across the bare stage on a diagonal from downstage right to upstage left, arms calmly rising, like the woman in Balanchine’s Serenade who leads off the final procession from downstage left to upstage right. As an opening statement, it is both an acknowledgement and an undoing: we may have come from there, Forsythe seems to say, but we are not going in the same direction. Once The Other Person has disappeared, enter the Character in Historical Costume (Kate Strong), a baroque presence with a flourish of welcome. To counteract this voluble female force is The Man with a Megaphone (Nicholas Champion), a 20th-century, nagging, rational male with a low battery. The unlikely scene is set. We are invited to step inside the mind of William Forsythe.

Here is the first broad sweep of movement across the stage in which the dancers of Royal Ballet Flanders give us a first taste of the kind of unity they can bring to their ensemble work. The group re-forms around the stage, and from it escapes the first duet by principals Aki Saito and Wim Vanlessen. This is the first time we see Forsythe’s language of pulled out lines and off balance lifts and promenades, the breaking of the classical lines. A second duet of first soloist Yurie Matsuura and corps member David Jonathan is more restrained but with the same neo-classical grammar. This appears to be familiar choreographic territory, but we are seeing it almost 30 years on, after several imitators have picked up Forsythe’s formal ideas without the intention. Despite its age, Artifact maintains its interest precisely because the intention is still very much alive and vibrant.

Part 2 is set to J.S. Bach’s hauntingly beautiful Chaconne in D Minor, the final movement of the Partita in D Minor, played in a recording by Nathan Milstein, to the accompaniment of his heavy breathing. The actors have retired; this is the movement of the dance untrammeled by any nattering dialectic. The corps de ballet lines the stage and the same two couples repeat material from their first movement duets, but here the music adds its own flowing lines to theirs, transforming it with its intimacy and complexity. The duets end magically as the four dancers merge into the two lines of the corps as they exit across the stage. Whatever Forsythe’s reason for bringing in the curtain during this second act, he surely would never have wanted the sound of the curtain hitting the stage to obtrude as much as it did at Sadler’s Wells.

Part 3 starts without warning; surprised audience members shuffle back to their seats as the action continues on stage. This is not the first time Forsythe seems to step out of his role of choreographer to comment on audience conventions, before diving back into the action. And dive he does.  After an opening off-balance, inside-out solo by corps member, Joseph Hernandez, the action descends into madness, stage elements are knocked down and the dance form deconstructed to the accompaniment of Forsythe’s own soundscape in which Bach’s Chaconne appears to be played backwards and The Character in Historical Costume repeats her phrases as rapidly as an auctioneer. The curtain comes down to applause and a solitary and unapologetic boo.

The solo piano, played throughout by the redoubtable Margot Kazimirska, returns with Part 4. Dance form reasserts itself as repeated patterns build up in a remarkable spatial complexity. Towards the end, The Other Person seems to draw into her body all the madness and chaos of the preceding movement. The two speaking characters continue their declamations, to less purpose. The storm has passed; calm is restored. The journey over, and it is time to step outside. The light has gone; all is silence.

This is the kind of work that draws out all the resources of a company and Royal Ballet Flanders has risen to the challenge admirably. The work has been carefully and lovingly put together by the director, Kathryn Bennetts, who was Forsythe’s rehearsal director for 15 years. There will never be abstract dance as long as the dance emanates from the mind of a person, even if not all of its content is readily understandable. Because Forsythe laid bare so much of himself in this seminal work for his new company, by the end of Artifact you feel you have made a journey of discovery that brings you closer to the human condition. It is a credit to the company that they have managed to achieve this so convincingly.