TWO world premieres by Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant are currently honouring Sylvie Guillem’s swansong as one of the most outstanding interpreters of ballet and contemporary dance over the last 35 years.

Life In Progress comprises two works and the first, Akran Kham’s techne, is a solo work accompanied by live musicians onstage.

It has Guillem emerging from a primordial state as she explores the uniqueness of her corporeal self, first as a quadruped and then as dancer in submission to nature.

Marking out time beneath and around a mysterious glass-coral tree, Guillem displays classical and contemporary technique of the highest order and shapes space in motifs which are both earth-bound and gravity-defying.

If techne is a meditation on the individual faced with the transcendence of time, Maliphant’s choreography for Here and Now places Guillem in relation to her bodily “other,” in a duet with Italian dancer Emanuela Montanari.

Aside from the colossal power and progression of the piece, the unison of the dancers is set against a wonderful matrix of textural and structural lighting design by Michael Hulls.

It’s an incomparable and spectacularly intricate arrangement of delicate chromatics which emphasise Guillem’s intensity and Montanari’s mirroring technique.

In both pieces, Guillem appears phenomenally relaxed and yet intimately aware of her extraordinary armoury of total physical expression and that’s evident too in the final piece, Max Ek’s valedictory Bye.

It’s a brilliant demonstration of the dancer’s timing as she interacts and moves through and between her living self in the performance space and on pre-recorded video.

Bye thrillingly captures the dancer’s movement dialogue with herself, ending in her departure from the stage. How we’ll miss her.

Runs until May 31 at Sadler’s Wells, box office: sadlerswells.com, them from July 28- August 2 at the London Coliseum, box office: eno.org

Review by Peter Lindley