Afterthoughts

The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell tour is an astonishing moment. One flinches. An eclipse has happened and the light has just run away with her. All gone. Michael Hulls’s momentous lighting states Guillem’s intentions as clearly as Elias Benxon’s filmwork in the closing piece, Mats Ek’s Bye, which shows this singular performer quitting her elite world of imagemaking and humbly, nervously, going out to join the masses in the street. After lights out, she intends there to be no legacy.

As I had hoped might happen, elements of Guillem’s closing show, unveiled at Sadler’s Wells in May, had progressed to advantage when it reappeared at the Coliseum to hoover up the queues of Londoners begging to see her in her long-adopted city for the last time.

Akram Khan’s solo for her, technê, has her scuttling less and exploring more. In the Coliseum’s broader spaces, Sylvie looked supernaturally light of foot, supremely fastidious and world-curious. The production seemed to have a personal theme now, binding the four works together: a sense of inquiry, expressed wonderingly (Khan), or amusedly (Forsythe), or serenely (Maliphant), or hopefully (Ek). And that really isn’t an empty legacy at all.

Carlos Acosta has absolutely different plans for his legacy. Now 42, the limitlessly charming Cuban superstar, who’s retiring from the Royal Ballet next year, is auditioning worldwide to launch his own troupe on his native island, and Cubanía, his self-produced show at the Royal Opera House, was also a kind of undressing for him. He is sloughing off his noble ballet togs and miraculously bouncy young grace and embracing a new contemporary habit, but I hope he doesn’t feel that he has something to apologise for.