Landscapes review – Russell Maliphant’s mesmeric, meditative works of dance and light

Russell Maliphant Dance Company’s arresting evening of three solos includes a spiritual offering performed by the choreographer himself

Watching Daniel Proietto dance Afterlight must be one of the best ways you could spend 15 minutes. This beautifully arresting piece of dance is the antidote to stimulation overload: one single smooth thread of movement finely spun across the spare piano chords of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes. As Proietto circles into deep backbends bathed in a pool of light, it’s like a 21st-century Dying Swan.

This evening of work by choreographer Russell Maliphant comprises only three solos. With Maliphant, nothing is in excess, everything is deliberate: every motion, every pause, every flicker of light; never more than is needed. Maliphant is a Royal Ballet-trained dancer who also studied martial arts and creates meditative, mesmeric works of dance and light in synthesis (lighting designers Michael Hulls and Panagiotis Tomaras are key parts of the creative process).

For fans, this programme comes with a wave of nostalgia. Afterlight was made for a Diaghilev-inspired evening at Sadler’s Wells in 2009. Another solo dates further back, Two, created in 1997 originally for Maliphant’s wife, Dana Fouras, here performed by Alina Cojocaru.

Two was also famously danced by ballerina Sylvie Guillem, a tall and forthright dancer of scimitar limbs, whereas you think of petite Cojocaru as a gossamer creature of the air. But confined to a small square of light in the centre of the stage, Cojocaru brings her own curiosity, strength and superlative artistry to familiar moves. Her eye follows her hand as it circles above her, setting out on a miniature investigation of movement within deliberately limited parameters, until her arms begin to blur like hummingbird wings.

Maliphant himself performs the final, recent work, In a Landscape. At 64, Maliphant retains his leonine grace and focused energy, although does delegate some choreography to the swathes of fabric hanging from the ceiling, which ripple in beams of light like dunes in a sandstorm, and allow him to dance in a trio with his own shadows. There’s something monk-like about Maliphant’s presence, slowly roaming the stage like a truth-seeking pilgrim, testing the membranes between worlds. And it does often feel like a spiritual (not religious) experience tuning into the alpha waves of Maliphant’s work, whether that’s for the first time, or the umpteenth.

• At Sadler’s Wells East, London, until 14 March