Review: Maud Le Pladec, Twenty-Seven Perspectives ★★★★★

At times interesting, often bemusing and sometimes verging on preposterous, Maud Le Pladec’s Twenty-Seven Perspectives is a piece for 10 dancers that continues the choreographer’s search for different ways to articulate music and movement.

It was inspired by the Swiss conceptual artist Rémy Zaug's 27 esquisses perceptives, where the artist took a painting by Cézanne and broke it into its component parts. In Twenty-Seven Perspectives, which dates from 2018, Le Pladec applies a similar method to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony to create series of fragmentary reinterpretations.

Ten dancers in loose, sporting street clothes take to Sadler’s Wells completely open stage – might the intention be to deconstruct the performance space itself?

They stand in well spaced diagonal lines waiting for composer Pete Harden’s electronic score, which is intended as a deconstruction of Schubert’s Unknown Symphony. In the first of three sections, the music is a sequence of electronic thrumming, through which very occasionally you can hear a brief snatch of Schubert’s symphony.

When they start moving they do so as individuals, each absorbed in him or herself, seemingly unaware of those their share a stage with. Their ever energetic abstract dances are an interesting combination of formal – deconstructed developés, attitudes – and informal, reminiscent of the joy and release of children in a playground, hop, skip and jumping, spinning around with their arms out and their faces raised and bathing in sunshine. Cartwheels abound.

It’s as if the musical notes had each decided to break away from the discipline of the musical composition and go their own individual ways, before coalescing again into a harmonious whole, when the movement responds slavishly to the rhythm of the music.

In the second and third sections, Schubert’s recorded music is finally heard, but in an over-amplified, occasionally distorted version that’s not kind to your ears (or to your heart, if you are a music lover…)

Some interesting gender-free pair work with unusual lifts enters the slow passages of the choreography, before a final section with much repeated jumping on and off stage, where nine dancers sit in the front row of the stalls, while a solo develops before them.

Éric Soyer’s lighting design, relying primarily on three big angled spotlights above the stage, creates a variety of interesting light and shade settings, not necessarily articulated with anything that goes on, but providing some visual variety.

After some 55 minutes the whole thing fizzles out, unresolved like Schubert’s own symphony; but whereas Schubert’s work leaves you craving more, Twenty-Seven Perspectives seemed to have exhausted all it had to say by about the 40 minutes mark. Worth seeing, nevertheless.