Maud Le Pladec: 27 Perspectives review – dizzying deconstruction of a Schubert symphony

Sadler’s Wells, LondonA loose, casual dance based on an artist’s interpretation of a Cézanne painting via a Pete Harden score is full of ideas that often feel out of sync You could watch French choreographer Maud Le Pladec’s show and easily miss a key fact: the 10 performers on stage are not always listening to the same music we are.The score for the work is by British composer Pete Harden, based on Schubert’s unfinished Symphony No 8. It’s as if that piece of music has been put through a mincer, coming out a bit fudgey, a bit stringy; one note stuck in a drone followed by surges of melody.But for the first movement, the dancers, wearing earpieces, are only hearing a “blueprint” based on the symphony’s opening motif, what Harden calls “the DNA” of the music. Sometimes the audience hears the same, sometimes we don’t. The effect it has on our experience of the dance is not exactly clear.The idea for this piece comes from Swiss conceptual artist Rémy Zaugg’s 27 Esquisses Perceptives (27 P