If you thought we had exhausted shows that were postponed by Covid, here is one more. The Composer series at Sadler’s Wells presents a night of new choreography set to the work of a single composer and this time it’s the turn of American Nico Muhly, no stranger to the world of dance.
Three very different choreographers tackle his music: Jules Cunningham, Maud Le Pladec and Michael Keegan-Dolan. The first two have broadly similar approaches. The dance listens closely to the endlessly imaginative textures of the score and chooses when to mimic – a shake of the knees to match a vibrato string, for example – and when to diverge.
Cunningham’s piece, Slant, is set to Muhly’s Drones, based on long, sustained string notes, which set up a sense of suspension (and suspense) that is a great foil for Cunningham’s stark movement, with its flat planes and improbable balances. It’s turned into something mysterious, liminal, unresolved. Cunningham’s six-strong cast includes two children and the incredible Ellen van Schuylenburch, who danced with Michael Clark in the 1980s and brings a dancing life’s worth of experience and mettle.
Le Pladec’s Veins of Water has three dancers who look as if they have forgotten to put their skirts on, in sheer shorts and glittery tops, waves of sequins matched by a wavy motif for the string instruments and the slinky movement of their jellyfish bodies. There’s an eerie glamour about them, like a 60s alien girl group. They shift from being enmeshed with the music to forging their own track, all the time looking us straight in the eye. Beguiling.
You get comfortable with one approach and then Michael Keegan-Dolan turns everything upside down and says: come into my world! One where American folk singer Sam Amidon is standing on a stool with a noose hanging from the ceiling and the dancers appear as skeletons doing jazz hands. Muhly wrote The Only Tune for Amidon in 2007, based on Scots murder ballad The Two Sisters. The simple folk tune is stretched out, blurred at all its edges and vividly coloured in (played by the Britten Sinfonia, also skeletons). Amidon is a still, constant presence amid the madness and it’s pure theatre, with a beating heart, an arched brow and a wicked glint in its eye. A show that’s worth waiting five years for.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 22 November
