There is an insidious air of earnestness about the evening of choreographies by Russell Maliphant now installed at the Coliseum. In spite of the presence of distinguished dancers – Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur; Ivan Putrov, Adam Cooper – to woo the punters, I mistrust works swathed in oh-so-artful darkness where you only fully and finally see the participants as they take curtain calls in the brightness of the front stage. I mistrust even more movement that has mistaken that old darling of the 1970s dance-scene, Contact Improvisation (“You fall on me and let’s see what happens”), for a means of creative endeavour.

Maliphant has made effective dance in the past (and this programme’s Two is intriguing) but the accumulation of four of his stagings, with skeletal forces – only duets are on offer, shared between seven dancers – and murkily “artistic” lighting which defines performers, in silhouette or outlined by enfeebled wattage, is desperately the same. (We may also consider the fact that pauses between the dances, certainly not owed to massive scene changes, since there is no scenery, serve merely to plump out an affair already suffering from emaciation and thin electronic accompaniment.)

Maliphant’s manner becomes claustrophobic as his performers crepuscularly grapple, then move disconsolately on. Light and air are at a premium: we are trapped in a world of introversion and hermetic repetition, and it is all very much the same.

At its best, in Two x Two, where Dana Fouras and Daniel Proietto exchange signals, flailing arms to produce arcs of post-retinal blur, the effects are fascinating. At its most self-regarding, in the Sheer duet for Oaks and Edur, and the half-hour déjà-vu phenomenon of Critical Mass for Cooper and Maliphant, the dance seemed about to disappear up its own pretensions.

The evening, emaciated at one hour and 13 minutes, also brought to mind a great American ballerina who, when the lighting failed utterly at the start of a ballet, began to sing “Dancing in the Dark...” ★★☆☆☆

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