Russell Maliphant Company, dance review: Dancing the light fantastic

Twenty years is a long time to work with the same person, but choreographer Russell Maliphant and lighting designer Michael Hulls have been exploring the meeting of bodies and light for two decades now and show no sign of colleague fatigue. Hulls is instrumental in Maliphant’s work — his light sculpts and highlights the dancers’ bodies, it creates structure, decoration, illusion and atmosphere.

Together they really own this aesthetic: the stark, low-lit stage; the tense, glitchy electronic soundtrack; the intensely mesmerising, drawn-out movement. In a programme of four pieces, there’s a danger — as in the final work, Piece No 43 — that formula can start to feel repetitive, but at its best, it’s hold-your-breath gorgeous.

The highlights are a mysterious, almost devotional solo for Maliphant’s wife Dana Fouras, her shadow writ large on a scrim at the front of the stage, then fracturing in multiple echoes; and a fantastic, elegantly composed piece for the dancers of Munich’s Bayerisches Staatsballett, called Spiral Pass, highlighting Maliphant’s instinctive sense of line and ability to seemingly play with the forces of physics — the female dancers swung in circles like ice skaters, skimming the floor.