Music: Pete Harden and Franz Schubert
Choreographer: Maud Le Pladec
Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 is more popularly known as the “Unfinished Symphony” because the composer only completed two movements and part of a scherzo. That work has been deconstructed and re-evaluated by composer Pete Harden to provide the score to Maud Le Pladec’s Twenty-seven Perspectives, which marks the choreographer’s first work to be performed on Sadler’s Wells’ main stage.
Le Pladec’s corps of ten dancers enter in casual wear – yoga pants, short, shell suit jackets – and initially they all seem intent on doing their own thing. There is some coordination in their tempo and style of movement, accompanied by low, prolonged chords that combine a bagpipe-like drone with short staccato bursts.
It is not until the music falls away to silence that the company performs in unison for the first time. Jackets discarded, there is a sense that the warm-up is over, that we are shifting perspective once more.
The changes keep coming, both in the score – which flits from what often sounds like some familiarly unfamiliar original music for a TV score to long periods of Schubert’s original composition – and in the dance. The bulk of the middle of Le Pladec’s piece is given over to solo performances, the other dancers silently dropping from the stage to watch from the front row. Harden’s score sometimes diverts into much more synth-based work, the choreography becoming similarly alien in quality.
Movements which involve more of the company break up the solos. Most interesting of these is a short piece where all ten dancers couple up, one performer becoming a dead weight as their partner manhandles them. Like each of the pieces in this work, searching for meaning is irrelevant: it is as engaging to look at as it is impossible to decode.
The variations of dance are accompanied by some (occasionally abrupt) lighting changes. Whether the sudden change in mood necessarily fits with the onstage motion is debatable, as they sometimes seem to be out of sync with the performers’ motions. The lighting is, though, consistent with the theme of the piece; unpredictable in its variation.
Billed as 55 minutes in length, Twenty-Seven Perspectives actually comes in under that running time by some degree. As the piece concludes with its company spinning, arms outstretched, one can’t help feeling that like the music which inspired it the dance is full of interesting movements, but lacks a sense of completeness.
Continues until 31 October 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Unfinished variation
