Sylvie Guillem: Life In Progress

Festival Theatre

Run ended

Reviewed by Alan Morrison

Almost four decades ago, Sylvie Guillem entered the Paris Opera Ballet School at the age of 11. Eight years later she was the professional company’s youngest-ever Etoile, handpicked for stardom by Rudolf Nureyev; four years after that, the toast of London as the Royal Ballet’s Principal Guest Artist.

Now, a few months after turning 50, she has decided to hang up her dance shoes with a final tour that doesn’t cherrypick a “greatest hits” from her classical ballet career but instead presents a well-balanced programme of contemporary dance featuring choreography by four individuals to whom she feels particularly close.

Over the course of this highlight of the 2015 Edinburgh International Festival, Guillem does not move, extend, scuttle or glide like any other 50-year-old dancer – or, indeed, any other 50-year-old, or any other dancer. She remains in a class of her own.

Those long, thin, strong limbs are put to good use in Akram Khan’s Techne, as Guillem performs an insectoid crawl, knees impossibly high from a crouched position, around a silver tree. Three musicians recede into the back-of-stage shadows, the sharpness of their percussive beats soundtracking the lightning-fast flick of Guillem’s joints as her arms move from A to B with, seemingly, no physical space in-between.

After male dancers Brigel Gjoka and Riley Watts perform William Forsythe’s DUO2015 with a bewitching asymmetry in which they never touch but are constantly aware of each other’s presence, Guillem returns with Emanuela Montanari for a duet of her own, Russell Maliphant’s Here & After. The lighting design (by Michael Hulls) is magnificent, beginning in dappled sepia before exploding into wider circles and squares, as the dancers’ two bodies form one shifting shape.

There’s a literal nod to the occasion in the closing piece, Bye, by Mats Ek. It’s a technically clever work, as an angular Guillem interacts with a door-shaped video projection – a portal to another dimension – through which she will leave, never to return. As stage farewells go, it has the self-consciousness of Shakespeare’s Prospero and a sentimental flavour, underscored by the Beethoven piano music, that’s almost Chaplinesque. But there’s also a childish wonder to Guillem’s performance that makes her art radiate with joy.