How salutary to encounter the cool cerebral elegance of Merce Cunningham’s choreography again. A figure at the heart of the abstract tendency in post-war American culture, the lover and collaborator of John Cage, Cunningham emptied barefoot dance of ideology, symbolism, plot, personality, pretension: instead it became purely an exploration of bodies in movement, responsive to chance, sound and light. Perhaps Cunningham’s language has been so deeply absorbed into the lexicon of modern dance that it no longer shocks or surprises. But its chaste beauty remains inviolate.
Lyon Opera Ballet – France’s equivalent to Rambert – has made a speciality of performing Cunningham, who died in 2009 at the age of 90. For an all too brief visit to London, it presented two of his later works. Beach Birds (1991)draws on the appearance of such creatures, their thoughts unknowable as they flutter and twitch minutely or not at all, absorbed in themselves, as dawn imperceptibly passes to dusk. The dancers’ hands are covered in mittens and their arms are used as flippers; what impels or motivates them is left entirely mysterious. Momentarily and fortuitously they come together in sculptural groupings or symmetries, but they are ungendered and without any emotional relation to each other. Cage’s music is minimal; there is no drama and nothing to bring this weirdly compelling spectacle to an obvious conclusion. It simply starts and stops.
In its time – it was first seen in 1999 – BIPED was considered revolutionary in its use of hologram technology. Ghostly stick figures float across a transparent scrim covering the front of the stage in a sort of counterpoint to the dancers behind it, dressed in gorgeously shimmering gold pyjamas.
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