Greek dance is a beguiling odyssey
Russell Maliphant’s new piece The Thread is, in many ways, quite unlike anything else he’s ever done. It sees the brilliant British contemporary choreographer (and his long-standing lighting designer Michael Hulls) temporarily step aside from his own, bijou troupe to team up with 18 performers from Greece and Oscar-winning Greek synth maestro Vangelis. The aim? To refract traditional Greek social dance through the prism of his own ethereal, uniquely fluid style of movement, finding a common “thread” between distant nations and eras.
You could, then, hardly fault this 80-minute, interval-free work for ambition – or, indeed, hope for a lovelier start. As Vangelis’s rich synth chords soar from the speakers, the entire company, exuberantly clad by Greek-born fashion designer Mary Katrantzou, glides serenely across the stage in a human chain.
The dancers’ individual movements are almost kindergarten-banal, a kind of shuffling two-step, but the collective motion is anything but. This flesh-and-blood “thread” – which also riffs upon the myth of Ariadne, Theseus and the labyrinth – joins, divides and folds in on itself like a giant Möbius strip, melting into different shapes and permutations. It’s a marvellous meeting of simplicity and complexity, and completely hypnotic.
It also sets the tone for the many subsequent episodes. In the larger formations, patterns repeatedly form and then deliquesce so smoothly into completely different permutations that you’re often left wondering how it actually happened. Similarly, ensemble passages melt into duos and solos with such ease that the joins are as good as invisible. As for the meeting of lively Greek “horos” and Maliphant’s lyrically mercurial style, this generally works well.
Elsewhere, Maliphant has dancers simultaneously perform the two completely contrasting idioms, one complementing the other, and with everything framed by Hulls’s impeccable oblongs of light. He also, on occasion, lets individual dancers let rip with what looks close to authentic, un-maliphanted Greek dance – the results here are tremendous, the men’s intricate whips of the leg not so different, as it happens, from traditional Irish dance.
One or two larger passages come across as rather glibly Greek- and Maliphant-lite, lacking his usual poetry. The dancers aren’t always perfectly in sync, while the combination of Vangelis’s south-east-mediterranean groove and certain lolloping, simian steps occasionally takes Maliphant headfirst into Hofesh Shechter territory, the first time I’ve felt his work resemble someone else’s.
That said, no one other than Maliphant and Hulls could have made (say) a quartet of female dancers look so ravishingly like an ancient temple’s caryatids come to life, or the entire female contingent, linking arms across the rear of the stage, so closely resemble a 30ft-long necklace of pure gold. Maliphant has done better, but there are far less beguiling ways of passing an evening, while the entire project’s cross-cultural warmth may be just what we all need right now.