When Sam Mendes was staging The Lehman Trilogy, an early idea was to have a wire walker above the stage, a perfect precarious symbol of human aspiration. He eventually dismissed the idea as distracting. When there’s someone on a high wire, it’s hard to concentrate on anything else.
So it is that the main attraction of Corps extrêmesis the world’s most daring highliner, Nathan Paulin, the man who holds the world record for the longest highline walk, and who now opens this show by the French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane.
He’s shown on film crossing a ravine at a nerve-shredding height, his body swaying in the wind, as he talks about conquering fear and finding calm. And then there he is on stage in front of you, insouciantly strolling across a loose wire in front of a white climbing wall. The Sadler’s Wells stage is probably a doddle for a man who once walked between the Eiffel Tower and the Chaillot theatre, but his presence high above your head still grips.
It’s fascinating to watch the minute calibrations of his body, arms moving in semaphore, toes curling around the wire as he holds his balance. Finally, he pauses, casually suspended in midair, as a line of eight acrobats appears at the top of the wall, before shinning down it like so many supple lizards. Once on the ground they reach for the air again; standing on each other like human totem poles, stretching upwards as Paulin reaches down.
Later, two extreme climbers join the action, Ann Raber Cocheril on stage climbing alongside the filmed Nina Caprez, who muses in voiceover about the thrill of danger. But it’s the acrobats who hold you rapt, moving with easy grace, thrusting each other into the air from each other’s cupped hands. They show you the extremes of trust and skill that their slo-mo passage into flight costs. It’s riveting and rather wonderful, full of athletic glory.
Three Score Dance perform at the other end of the athletic scale. A group of non-dancers, all over the age of 60, they ask us to watch dance not for its ability to thrill by its power and their prowess but for the way that it changes perceptions about ageing.
There were three works in Rose Until It Touched the Sky, performed as part of the Brighton festival. Umbra, mounted by Edd Arnold and Charlie Brittain from the Russell Maliphant Dance Company, explores the same ground as Maliphant’s recent Vortex. The dancers struggle with the deep bends and curves of the choreography but there is something touching about watching them turn in Ryan Joseph Stafford’s shadowed light, noting the different quality of their movement.
Obs!, by company director Jason Keenan-Smith, is bright and breezy but feels a bit like the start of a larger work – which is exactly what it is. But Rhiannon Faith’s You’re Here, You’re Here is a fabulously inventive piece that brings the dancers together in a kind of mutual support group and then, through fragmentary passages of repeated movement and snatches of words, paints a picture at once poignant and hopeful. It lets you see the performers for what they can do rather than what they can’t, fearless in their own gentle way.
Star ratings (out of five)
Corps extrêmes ★★★★
Rose Until It Touched the Sky ★★★
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You’re Here, You’re Here will form part of the Company of Elders programme at Sadler’s Wells, London, on 1 July
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May 28, 2023 at 03:00PM
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Corps extrêmes; Rose Until It Touched the Sky – review - The Guardian
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