Nitin Sawhney with Wang Ramirez

 Nitin Sawhney with Wang Ramirez, Royal Albert Hall, November 2

Nitin Sawhney at Royal Albert Hall (photo: Morah Geist)

Being an Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells means Nitin Sawhney has privileged access to dance; he is, after all, known to dance enthusiasts for his collaborations with Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. This evening, Royal Albert Hall and Sadler’s Wells have got together for the first time to co-produce a dance element by inviting the duo Wang Ramirez — Honji Wang and Sébastien Ramirez — to perform with Sawnhey and his guests. It’s a revelation not only on a musical level but choreographically.

In front of a series of vertical panels on which is projected the artwork from his 2015 Dystopian Dream, Sawhney plays a number of tracks from the album and from his wide-ranging catalogue. His music is based on an elaborate layering of sounds and textures led by Sawnhey himself on guitar or piano. Occasionally a single instrument or voice from the ensemble will rise above the orchestration to sing its own song, as with tabla player Aref Durvesh, flautist and vocalist Ashwin Srinivasan, and cellist Ian Burdge. Despite their individual quality, other instrumentalists fare less well on the balance of sounds in the cavernous Albert Hall. Sawhney’s use of the voice as an integral part of his instrumentation leads to some fine performances, particularly from J’Danah and Tina Grace whose voices have what Roland Barthes called ‘le grain de la voix’, or a rich textural quality that carries the sound.

Wang and Ramirez dance two consecutive pieces in each half of the program. Sound quality is not something that concerns them yet in their first track, Time Trap, they perform like two additional instruments in the band, so totally inside the music that we see it as they dance. Like an inspired riff on the music, it’s infectious; if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had had the disciplinary makeup of Ramirez and Wang — gymnastics, b-boying and martial arts, to name a few — this is how they might have moved. In addition to the rhythmic speed and precision — there are as many articulations in their bodies as there are notes in the music — there is a clarity of line and a mercurial virtuosity in the duo’s performance that takes the breath away. For the second piece, Silence, with Eva Stone on vocals, the balance of dance to music is less effective; the choreographic language is similar but it stands outside the framework of the song. I find myself watching the dance while the music continues in the background. In the second half, in which Sawhney introduces his Latin side, Wang and Ramirez dance to Redshift with lead vocals by J’Danah and to a recorded track, Dimensions. In both the fluid complicity with the music is back. The body is once again both instrument and musician, silently creating images like a skillful mime while building its vocabulary by effortlessly adopting and playing with such kathak idioms as the rippling arms. This is the alchemy of artistic collaboration, a process of contributing to and being transformed by the other. As artists working both inside and outside their cultural identities, Wang and Ramirez have built their reputation on this kind of sensitivity just as Sawhney has done in his fusion of musical influences. The three have a lot in common and it shows.

In a written interview I conducted with Wang and Ramirez, Wang remembers first hearing Sawhney’s Homelands when she was 16. ‘I loved that sound, but for me he was an artist who was far away from where I was…’ Before going on stage in the second half, she would have heard the same track with Srinivasan and Grace on lead vocals. Whatever distance there might have been has evidently shrunk to a proximity we can all enjoy.