Marking the Time Review – Nico Muhly Inspires a Great Night of Tricky Dancing | Dance

IIf you think we’ve exhausted the shows that have been postponed due to Covid, here’s another one. The Composer Series at Sadler’s Wells presents a night of new choreography by one composer and this time it is the turn of American Nico Muhly, who is no stranger to the world of dance.

Three different choreographers handle his music: Jules Cunningham, Maud Le Bladec, and Michael Keegan-Dolan. The first two have a broadly similar approach. The dance listens closely to the endless imaginative textures of the music and chooses when to emulate — shaking the knees to match a vibrating string, for example — and when to diverge.

Cunningham’s piece, “Slant,” is set to Muhly drones, based on long, sustained string tones, which create a sense of suspension (and suspense) that is a great foil to Cunningham’s stark movement, with its flat levels and improbable balances. It has turned into something ambiguous, liminal, unresolved. Cunningham’s six-person cast includes two children and the amazing Ellen van Schuylenborsch, who danced with Michael Clarke in the 1980s and brings to life dance the experience and enthusiasm it deserves.

Le Pladec’s Veins of Water features three dancers who look as if they’ve forgotten to put on their skirts, in sheer shorts and shiny tops, waves of sequins matching the undulating shape of stringed instruments and the graceful movement of jellyfish bodies. There’s a strange magic about them, like an alien girl group from the 1960s. They go from immersing themselves in the music to composing their own compositions, all the while looking us straight in the eye. Deceptive.

You get comfortable with one approach and then Michael Keegan Dolan turns everything upside down and says: Come into my world! One where American folk singer Sam Amidon stands on a chair with a rope hanging from the ceiling and the dancers appear as skeletons playing jazz hands. Muhly wrote Amidon’s only tune in 2007, based on the Scottish murder ballad The Sisters. The simple folk tune is stretched and blurred at all ends and vividly colored (played by Britten Sinfonia, also Skeletons). Amidon is a constant, constant presence amidst the madness and its pure theatre, with a beating heart, an arched brow, and a sinister gleam in his eye. A show worth waiting five years for.