Roger McGuinn shows him how The Byrds made their jingle-jangle sound an ancient finger-picker named Model T Ford

Roger McGuinn shows him how The Byrds made their jingle-jangle sound; an ancient finger-picker named Model T Ford offers a close-up whiff of the blues.But his key encounters are in London Vinicius Cantuaria pinpoints the quality of bossa nova. And when he sets off to drink at founts of wisdom in the rock guitar’s natural home, it’s a pleasure to go with him. The advice he is given is refreshingly basic: get the rhythm, feel what you are playing, don’t be hexed by your lack of technique. He discovers the interesting harmonic effects when you shift your fingers in a routine chord-position up a couple of frets; he also learns right-hand ruses.As a natural writer of clean, evocative prose, he manages to bring his family into the narrative without trying our patience. Four chords would suffice to deliver Davey Graham’s “Anji”, the song that obsessed him, provided he could tweak them with a few simple tricks.

As one of the “tone deaf” brigade at school – how many lives have been blighted by that put-down – he doesn’t even aspire to read music. Reading tablature will be his limit.
Armed with a £160 job from Denmark Street, and seeking advice from guitarists, he quickly learns he is not tone deaf – but given that his heroes include those refined Sixties luminaries Davey Graham and Bert Jansch, he should have realised that. Observing that the entire output of Velvet Underground could be achieved on the basis of a few simple chords, he didn’t aspire to Segovia-style dexterity. What could he achieve, from a standing start, in the intervening six months?

His aims were modest. After two decades of thinking about it but never touching an instrument, Will Hodgkinson decided to force the issue by booking a public date for himself. Guillem’s height, quite apart from her stardom, made her physically imposing. With its new cast, Push becomes softer, gentler, more modest..

One in three British households has a guitar, and young British Blairs harbour dreams of strutting on stage with one. Now, the five wind around each other, a line holding hands, or break into smaller groups. They cast shadows on the walls, or drift from one box of light to another.Push, originally danced by Maliphant and Guillem, looks quite different with Varona and Julie Guibert, who are less evenly matched: when he picks her up, he can cradle her small body protectively. The crackling score, by the sound artist Mukul, samples a voice counting: it could be a radio link between spaceships At last the spotlit hands find each other, clasp, move on. Five women move and turn on the stage, with glimmers of light – are they holding torches? We catch glimpses of hands, feet, held in a spotlight before vanishing. Varona can go from a languid reclining pose to a fully stretched stance, without allowing a single angle to break flow.

He’s always in control of long phrases.Light and shadow are part of Maliphant’s choreography. He recently celebrated 10 years of collaboration with his lighting director, Michael Hulls, who puts the dancers in squares of light, or wraps them in a golden haze The new Transmission starts in near-darkness. He proves to be an ideal Maliphant interpreter, tall, muscular, fluent. His dances, influenced by capoeira, t’ai chi and yoga, have a muscular fluency: restrained, graceful, nothing forced or flashy These works are always elegant, sometimes bloodless.

Maliphant’s profile was raised partly by the fame of other dancers. He was taken up by the Ballet Boyz and the French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, and this helped to take his work to larger stages, bigger audiences.
This evening starts with the new solo for Varona, a Cuban dancer last seen here with Carlos Acosta’s Tocororo. Maliphant, recently appointed associate artist at Sadler’s Wells, has quietly established himself as a leading choreographer. When the dancer Alexander Varona flings one arm up, the impulse upwards is strong and clear, yet it takes a while for his arm to rise. The move comes through the shoulder, fluid and weighted, and it’s not until the shoulder muscles have flexed and drawn together that the arm lifts, sure and calm It’s liquid as in golden syrup: nothing so splashy as water. As Eddie, the raging Vietnam veteran, Ron Todorowski hurls himself into repeated jumps and turns, flips from handstand to handstand. For every emotion, Tharp gives him one big step and leaves him to repeat it to what must be the point of exhaustion He never flags, but there’s no spontaneity..