Sylvie

Tonight I saw Sylvie Guillem's "Life in Progress" at the London Coliseum - added dates as part of her "farewell" tour. The programme included pieces made for her by her longtime collaborators Akram Khan, Russell Maliphant and Mats Ek, with a guest appearance of a duo from Bill Forsythe.

This isn't a review. It just triggered a memory 13 years ago when I first set eyes on Sylvie on the stage of the Opera Garnier in Paris. I had picked up a student ticket in the gods, not really even knowing what I was going to see. She was dancing in Manon, returning as a guest to the Paris Opera. She set the stage on fire. That performance changed my life. It was one of the defining moments in my understanding of performance, and bringing something personal and challenging to every performance.

Over the years I watched her at every opportunity I could get, on stage, on DVD and on youtube.  One of her statements from her DVD Evidentia has stayed with me: (this is a very rough paraphrase as I understood it then) that if you take a risk on stage as a performer, push yourself to the point where you almost fear what you do, then you will take the audience with you entirely. They will feel that risk and go with you.

But as I watched her over time I often felt quite sad that I found that few of her performances gave me the thrill I first felt when I saw her. Her collaboration pieces of the past few years quite underwhelmed me. As did some of the programme tonight. Yes, 6 o'clock legs, fine and fierce control. But I didn't see her quite as much. Except for Bye by Mats Ek.

More than about Sylvie, tonight told me a lot about me, and how I've changed as a dancer in 15 years. How my tastes and my aspirations, my idea of my "work" has gone from technical performance, pushing myself all out in performing presence, to creating and bumbling and fearing, to playing and now driving myself on to investigate questions of society, questions of the body's capacities, and questions of abstract composition and the relevance of art and performance.