Opening Dance Umbrella with a new commission, and a genuinely experimental one at that, tells you everything you need to know about the contemporary dance event.
Instead of easing us into the month-long festival with a feelfamiliar piece, we get British choreographer Russell Maliphant and Turner Prize-nominated video artist Isaac Julien let loose in a sandbox of conceptual light and motion.
Cast No Shadow is an episodic, asymmetric, three-part film and dance work featuring two existing Julien films and one brand new one. The first film, the parched Fantôme Afrique, is screened as in the cinema, on its own and in the dark. The second, the snowy True North, is accompanied by fragmentary dance. And the last, the new Small Boats, made with Maliphant on aquatic themes, includes six dancers both in the film and on the stage.
You have to assume that in collaborating, Maliphant and Julien were aiming to integrate film and dance, and make something more together than they ever could on their own.
Indeed, the very word 'collaboration' conjures the promise of artistic magic, as well as invoking all those dazzling past link-ups, like Diaghilev and Picasso.
However, Julien and Maliphant don't quite synergise. Occasionally you sense the two artists chime, anticipating, paralleling and echoing the other.
Occasionally there is a visual tug and a physical pull that take you on a journey somewhere between what you see and what you feel.
Cast No Shadow is visual velvet, but the film is lushly over-bearing, and the choreography loses its way in the last part. You leave doubting if film and dance can share a stage - and wondering why Maliphant, whose reputation went to the moon after working with ballerina Sylvie Guillem, would seem happy with the minor role.
Tonight only. Dance Umbrella runs until 10 November. Information: 0844 412 4312. www.danceumbrella.co.uk.
Dance Umbrella 2007: Isaac Julien And Russell Maliphant: Cast No Shadow(True North/Fantome Afrique/Small Boats)
Sadler's Wells
Rosebery Avenue, EC1R 4TN
