THE EXEMPLARY SYLVIE GUILLEM

LIKE STARING AT THE SUN | February 9th 2008

Bill Cooper/Sadler€™s Wells

Sylvie Guillem is a remarkable dancer who, at 43, shows no signs of slowing down. James Woodall witnesses her latest show, "PUSH", and is awed by her liquid precision and seemingly effortless technique ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

There are artists whose ever-greenness delights the world, but behind their survival lies a deeper lesson. Great artists are great because they can draw on resources the rest of us do not possess. Picasso and Ingmar Bergman were incapable of being uncreative or boring until their final breaths.

In the land of the living, Bob Dylan has never stopped, in 46 years of recording and performing, working out how to do something and sound new. As noted here recently, he even proves adept with a paintbrush. Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso, 65 and grey-headed, still writes provocatively intense poems for his Bahian soul music. He sings with a voice that appears to have been hatched, yesterday, from honey.

Yet for my money, one of the most exemplary artists at work today is Sylvie Guillem, a French ballerina. I should say ex-ballerina, as she gave up ballet per se some years ago. At 43, she is considerably younger than the above-mentioned legends, but a dancer's fate becomes uncertain the moment she enters her 20s.

Guillem is special: not only has she carried on, but her technique is effortless. And she is gifted with a physique most dancers only dream of. Her luck is that she has been relatively injury-free, but also she has been intelligent with her talent. Now, she is busy setting new standards for contemporary dance, offering dancers half her age a template of what daily training and a sharp mind can bring in maturity.

Her CV is well-known. She had no early training in ballet--she wanted to be a gymnast--but before she was 20 at the Paris ballet, Rudolf Nureyev promoted her to Ã©toile (which is a bit like anointing an archbishop in the ecclesiastical world) .

In 1989 she fled Paris--viewed in France as a national disaster--and joined the Royal Ballet in London. For nearly 20 years the British capital has been her home. There, she has stepped cleanly from the rarefied confines of the barre, arabesques and fouettÃ©s and into the looser, more improvisatory space of modern dance.

Working with dancer-choreographers Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, she has demonstrated (with, as one London critic has put it, the "fluky perfection of her body") how the disciplines of ballet--line, posture, extension--can release instinctive talent into new forms of expression.

"PUSH" is a four-part show designed for Guillem by Russell Maliphant. It has been touring the world since 2005 and arrived in Berlin at the end of January. Some months ago, it became the least negotiable date in my 2008 theatre calendar. I first caught it in London in spring 2007, and was lucky to witness it again: "PUSH" looks as sleek as ever.

The first piece sees a barefoot Guillem, in diaphanous cotton top and trousers, dancing alone to the flamenco guitar of Carlos Montoya. She covers the stage like threads of calligraphy, writing a story of lightness and speed; the slenderness of her frame allows her somehow to float, under penumbral lighting, just above the floor. Though there is drama, she is never abrupt: this is ten minutes of liquid precision.

The second, elegiac piece, "Shift", features Maliphant alone, dancing in conversation with his own shadow, or shadows. The final piece, much the longest (about 30 minutes), is quite a slow duet for both dancers. Its sinuousness and--again, one has to use the word--precision seem to make up the show's backbone (and gives it its name).

But it is the third piece, "Two", that I want to concentrate on. Maliphant created this in 1997 for a dancer named Dana Fouras. After various reimaginings, it now enthrones Guillem and cannot be improved upon. In a cube of orange light, a dark figure is still; her left foot, arched, is forward. Small drops of electric music (composerd by Andy Cowton) make her arms and head move, as if prompting a caryatid slowly to unfold.

The music speeds up, then percussion kicks in. Suddenly, her arms explode, rotating above her head, round her shoulders. The caryatid doubles up, head forward, and we see a smooth, bare back: the unmistakable sign of the woman in this constricting, Beckettian cube. Her legs take her sideways, she turns, fixes a stare on the audience, and once again her arms shoot out and up, as if trying to catch rays of light. At one point, a hand grasps at where the light is brightest but the other grabs it back, twice. All this is done with an almost frightening metronomic propulsion.

"Two" lasts less than ten minutes, but its fervent intricacy gives the illusion of something twice as long. Once seen, it demands to be seen again, straightaway. Like all the best art, it suggests other media: kinetic sculpture, a perfect song, a short poem-in-motion.

At a brief press conference before the Berlin opening of "PUSH", Guillem spoke of a question Nureyev had put to her years ago. "Are you afraid before going on stage?" he asked her. Yes, she admitted, she often was. Nureyev told her the fear would later become worse and worse. "And because I'm an old dancer," Guillem beamed, "I know." She added: "I've given a good friend a licence to shoot."

Sylvie Guillem evinces no signs of aging or fear; exactitude, strength, passion, yes. So put away the guns. Watch out, Dylan and Veloso. This Frenchwoman will outshine you yet.

"PUSH" is at London's Coliseum, April 4^th-7^th.

(James Woodall is a writer based in Berlin.)