On Dance

The names Mark Wallinger, Richard Serra and Eadweard Muybridge don’t usually spring to mind when you think of ballet. But these three artists were behind the ballet that I went to see at Sadler’s Wells on Friday as part of an intriguing double-bill.

The show opened with a visually stunning vocal piece called ‘Twice through the Heart’ designed by OpenEnded Group. The single female singer existed in a series of intense squares of light like an Edward Hopper painting; but also behind a screen on which nebulous 3D images of rooms or of writing appeared as she sang. These reminded me of some of Tacita Dean’s blackboard images. It was a spine-tingling piece.

The ballet followed this: a collaboration between the choreographer Wayne McGregor, composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, and artist Mark Wallinger. It was built around Richard Serra’s verb list from the 1960s and Muybridge’s The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs. The eleven-strong troupe of dancers appeared in skin-coloured body suits in front of a Muybridge-style grid. A projection of them followed their moves on the rear screen creating a mirror image. As they danced in and out of different groups and pairings they resembled multiple Muybridge snapshots of the human figure in motion, but they also became like Anthony Gormley statues, plasticine figures, famine victims or soldiers; a complex association with the ‘UN’ signs projected by Wallinger at the sides of the stage.