Choreographer: Merce Cunningham
The Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections Festival takes a trip back to the 1990s with a double bill of works from Merce Cunningham from the beginning and end of that decade. Both are particularly interested in the nature of movement and its connection to different kinds of group dynamics. But Merce Cunningham: Forever staged at Sadler’s Wells feels like a fairly long night with two hefty dances and mixed impact.
30-minute piece Beach Birds is the earlier work, seemingly taking place over a single day from a pinkish sunrise to a bold orange sunset. The curtain rises on a group of eight dancers in fitted suits and blackened arms outstretched, posed and waiting. It’s never clear what birds they are from Marsha Skinner’s costumes but there are hints of penguins and storks in some of the movements. What follows will either be the most impressive feat of personal and collective endurance or a piece that fails to live up to the dynamic first visual image within its multi-story but abstract dance.
Beach Birds has lots of different elements focused around the anthropomorphic bird creatures that gather onstage, and the dancers perform in groups of two or three to create an overall series of balletic stretches and leaps. Cunningham includes lots of fluttering hand movements that give the dancers their avian expression, but those different waves of activity never fully unify so what unfolds is just a day of bird watching.
It is hard to know, beyond the impressive physical exertion of the dancers, what the purpose might be when there is no obvious jeopardy, even when a new bird arrives which is welcomed and included, never feared. Purpose is less of a problem for the second dance from 1999, BIPED, a 40-minute space fantasia partially created by computer software that taps into the millennial intensity of the era with its visions of futuristic characters exploring different shapes and interactions.
There is a commonality between the two pieces and Cunningham re-employs the bird-like extended arms and forward stretches in this second dance, yet there is far more dynamism here, both in Gavin Bryars’ increasingly dramatic composition that nods to Holst’s Planet Suite and in the visual impressions that skitter across the stage. Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar generate ‘holograms’ that move across the front screen, large-scale dance sketches that deliberately never match the human performers and, later, otherworldly patterns and bars roll across the screen at pertinent moments.
Added to this Suzanne Gallo’s sci-fi disco-fitted costumes and there is much in Biped to absorb the viewer even if its 40-minute running time begins to feel a little cumbersome. Danced by the Lyon Opera Ballet, there is great complexity in Merce Cunningham: Forever that showcases the company’s control and stamina but the evening never really takes flight.
Runs until20 March 2025
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90s revival
