Ballet de Lyon at Sadler’s Wells – Merce Cunningham 2025.iii.21
What are we watching here? Are these movements just movements? Or is this a poetic dance drama with metaphors? Those opposite possibiljities – present in all choreograph – becomes peaks of ambiguity in the work of Merce Cunningham. The Ballet de Lyon – which, in these last ten years, may have become world’s foremost exponent of Cunningham choreography – has just brought a double bill of two late-period Cunningham dances. Both “Beach Birds” (1991) and “BIPED” (1999) were made during the choreographer’s seventies, when he was using a dance computer to help him devise movement. (“BIPED” had its premiere two weeks after Cunningham’s eightieth birthday.) Both show his lifelong commitment to movement for movement’s sake; both shows different ways of being about something other than these dancers and these steps.
“Beach Birds” has always seemed Cunningham’s – almost disappointingly – most literally representational work. When we watch six dancers, while all balancing on one foot (each), quivering their extended other foot (feet!), of course we see the quivering of wingtips. When we see four men, holding hands, pose in a wide, fixed ring that’s entered by one woman after another, it’s easy to see a nest, perhaps visited by successive chicks. When we see a man slowly rippling his arms while he keeps the rest of his body firm in one long shape, of course we see a bird carried along in steady flight by a current of air. The long stillnesses and irregular groupings are those of birds on a beach. The dancers’ arms and hands have the unbroken lines of extended wings.
And yet “Beach Birds” is no simple dance translation of the bird life of any one beach. Part of its beauty is that its literalism keeps breaking down. We’re seeing different images of avian behaviour – indeed, diverse avian species – spliced onto one another . A male dancer holds a long-lined balance as if gliding effortlessly through the air, but he rapidly vibrates a single hand like a bird on the ground. A male-female duet shows us protective behaviour – yet look! It’s the female who guards the male, and with arms extended as if – impossibly – flying at the same time.
As imagery of human behaviour, “Beach Birds” is (like so much Cunningham) very Zen, full of meditative stillnesses and unthreatened personal space, courteous coexistences, quiet groupings. You keep expecting it to become dull, only to find the opposite is true: it draws you in to its nothing-happening abundance. Physically, it draws so much attention to the upper body (often motionless or very slow) that it’s easy to overlook its occasional jump-jump-and-jump-again phrases.
A general rule of Cunningham dance theatre, over more than fifty years, was that composers, designers, and Cunningham composed their music, sets, costumes, and choreography separately. When the different elements came together on opening night (Cunningham dancers rehearse in silence) the results could involve expressive clashes, Both “Beach Birds” and “BIPED,” however, are examples of collaborative harmony. (Cunningham did tell his artistic colleagues the title and length of the work when he gave them their commissions.) For “Beach Birds,” the black-and-white costumes, by the painter Marsha Skinner, suggest wings and plumage. Her lighting firmly evokes the sequence of dawn, daylight, sunset. John Cage’s score (probably his quietest after the silent “4”33’”) features a rainstick, isolated piano notes, single electronic notes: a study of peace away from humans.
“BIPED”, by contrast, is intensely and imaginatively civilised. Aaron Copp’s lighting makes the floor a changing chessboard; Suzanne Gallo’s costumes are shimmering and reflective, with chic armour but leaving legs and arms bare. The gauze between the stage and the audience is dramatized by digital imagery (by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar) derived from computer visions of Cunningham dance phrases, sometimes spinning across the pictures, sometimes fragmenting into patterns that suggest stained-glass windows in motion. Gavin Bryars’s score – far more melodic and tonal than most Cunningham music, and, though played live, changing far less from one rendition to another – is solemn, fateful, now ominous and now numinous.
Amid all tbis, Cunningham’s own dances for “BIPED” are a forty-minute cornucopia with no prolonged stillnesses anywhere, with sequences of complex footwork, effortless changes of direction, dancers sweeping across the stage in powerful turns or jumps. The scale, from the first, is heroic, expansive.
Entrances are often momentous, and sometimes simultaneous. Several horizontal groups of five or three dancers, entering together from the back, pause dramatically in half-light. (I find myself seeing such all-female trios as fate figures; one episode for a man and three women becomes, in my mind, Macbeth and the weird sisters, but wheeling around the stage as if forever suspended in the same situation.) Elsewhere women and men register with equal force. Women are sometimes lifted by men, but with no loss of command. Exits at the back show dancers suddenly vanishing in space. Many have felt “BIPED” is about death or about the limbo between worlds. Although Cunningham did not encourage any such readings, he certainly maximised the mysterious and intense drama of the world onstage, with dancers vanishing at the back or materialising, angelically, as if from thin air.
Yet when you go on studying “BIPED” it often becomes as formally classical a structure as a Beethoven sonata. These movements really are about themselves. Legs are often extended sideways; jumps are often made to the side. In one unforgettably turned-out image – very biped indeed – a woman advances towards us on wide-parted feet (her legs maintain an upended V shape), rapidly rippling her way ahead in tiny steps that send vibrations through her body. Dancers face every which way, and by no means always move in the direction they are facing. One female soloist enters backwards, on half-toe.
Although arms and legs are mainly radially turned out, sometimes Cunningham turns them in or makes them parallel. In one all-female quintet, the dancers keep their arms parallel (aiming forwards from the torso rather than sideways) but also asymmetrical, with broken lines. These were among the games that the elderly Cunningham devised at his computer. (“Let’s show them angling their wrists like society ladies, but at crazily different levels.”) They add dashes of wit and weirdness to the immense world that is “BIPED”. Amid the larger suggestions of life, death, and the cosmos that this magnum opus still conjures, they show the creative twinkle in Cunningham’s eye.
AM
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