20-03-2025
Cunningham Forever: Bask in the strange, hypnotic beauty of a great choreographer
Somebody once asked dancer-turned-choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) what one particular piece of his was about. His reply was simple: 'It's about 40 minutes.'
An alumnus of Martha Graham's trailblazing company, and the longtime companion of composer John Cage, he was modern dance's great abstract expressionist. Which, rather in the vein of drip-fiend Jackson Pollock, has made him the genius choreographer that even devoted dance fans are 'allowed' to dislike.
Cunningham pioneeringly introduced chance into the creative process, with steps and score generally distant acquaintances at most. He tended to rehearse his dancers – with daunting rigour – in silence, meaning that the first time they'd hear the score would be at the work's premiere. Small wonder the choreographer Mark Morris, his similarly revered but famously 'musical' compatriot, has expressed reservations.
Depending on point of view, either everything or nothing 'happens' in Cunningham's pieces, which are not entirely un-balletic in terms of the poise and discipline required (if absolutely not ballet), and which dancers are required to deliver with entirely impassive faces. His work teases, suggests, evokes – but anyone hoping for anything even remotely resembling a narrative, or even any kind of conventional stylistic or dramatic beginning, middle or end, will be thwarted.
The two pieces on offer from the visiting and well-drilled Lyon Opera Ballet, as part of this month's London-wide Dance Reflections, are a case in point. They begin, they go through a labyrinth of different and random-feeling permutations. And then, when you least expect it, the curtain descends: that's it, folks.
Beach Birds (1991), which opens the bill, sees an octet of dancers extremely loosely pretending to be just that. Half an hour long, it's a strange, extraordinarily serene confection, one whose visual and choreographic elements – all hinting at the title, without any of them entirely going there – coalesce perfectly.
Designer Marsha Skinner has the cast wearing black-and-white unitards with black gloves, and the action playing out against a subtly changing cyclorama that might (or might not) represent the passing of a day. Cage's score-cum-soundscape alternates between deadpan individual piano notes and a kind of shimmering, Pink Floydian gurgle that could be waves retreating from a sun-dappled pebbly shoreline, or else just good old electronic static. And amid all this, the dancers – either individually, or else in groups of two, three, or more, one cluster seeming to spark another off at random – hop, strike poses and flicker their limbs in a manner that's neither entirely avian nor entirely human. It's as if Cunningham has metamorphosed them into a curious kind of flesh-and-blood, animal/human pun, but in the most benign and beautiful way.
Heftier in terms of both length (50 minutes) and cast (14), 1999's BIPED comes across as a high-tech, virtual-reality cousin of its alfresco forebear. Playing out to Gavin Bryars's artful wash of electronica, its actual steps were formulated with the help of DanceForms software, with Cunningham then deploying motion-capture to create huge avatars of the dancers that intermittently skitter, skip and twirl across the otherwise invisible gauze at the front of the stage.
Its sheer length makes it quite a commitment on the part of the audience. And unlike Beach Birds, it occasionally (in one quintet, particularly) revealed cracks in the dancers' unity on Wednesday's opening night. Resist trying to impose conventional order on it, however – even if you might eke out an elegiac note at its close – and this kaleidoscopic symphony of sound, light and movement can (and here did) cast quite a spell.
Cunningham forever? You wouldn't entirely bet against it.
