Men in Motion, Sadler's Wells - review

The likelihood, of course, is that he will pop up in New York, or St Petersburg, or even back at the Royal Ballet once tempers have cooled and egos mended. But if Sunday night at Sadler's Wells was his last ever performance, then he followed the Gypsy Rose Lee formula - tease 'em, but leave 'em wanting more. A career that promised (promises?) so much deserves a more substantial sendoff than a five-minute Soviet stocking filler.

If Kasian Goleizovsky's Narcisse is a squib, though, it is anything but damp. Polunin announced himself with the kind of leap that has you searching for the wires, before collapsing a blindingly swift pirouette into a wild, watchful crouch.

He is one of those dancers who is thrilling even when still, with a changeling quality that imbues every moment with unpredictability and danger. So when he span and twisted as Narcisse, he had the maddened abandon of something lethal chasing its own tail, and cursed with the ability to catch it.

The ballet, like Polunin's current situation, presents a vision of talent and beauty cannibalising themselves. It was chosen as part of Ivan Putrov's Men in Motion gala months ago. Talk about prophecy.

Polunin has stolen the headlines, but there is more than his few minutes to this sketchbook of how the male body has been used in dance. Putrov's own new work, Ithaka, casts its maker as an epicurean hero hesitating between a rough-maned Aaron Sillis and the more orthodox if slightly ball-breaking charms of Elena Glurdjidze. There are striking passages - like the intimately simple waltzes between the men which end with Sillis throwing himself foetally into Putrov's arms - but too much stodge between them.

The earliest piece on show was Fokine's 1911 Le Spectre de la Rose, in which a pink-petalled Igor Kolb gave us pot pourri when what we really wanted was incense and opium. None of the ballets, though, could match Russell Maliphant's contemporary dance, Afterlight, which allowed the remarkable, mystically rotating Daniel Proietto to illuminate all the shades of masculinity from urchin to angel.

Ivan Putrov: Men In Motion
Sadler's Wells
Rosebery Avenue, EC1R 4TN