Dance
Irresistible Cunningham
Giannandrea Poesio
It was difficult not to be overwhelmed at the end of the opening night of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Barbi- can last week. Cunningham, now 81, is one of the 'great prophets of 20th-century dance', to quote an early review. He emanates an awesome and irresistible aura of artistic mysticism, unlike those monstres sacres who still populate the dance world. The darting glances with which he acknowl- edged the more than deserved ovation to his art and to his latest work, Biped, revealed a witty, almost innocent and sur- prised response. Similarly, the down-to- earth, yet magical movements with which he thanked his performers, the musicians and the audience speak of an incredibly humble, eternally youthful nature. His appearance, therefore, was the highlight of a highly successful evening and turned it into an occasion to remember.
Biped, created in 1999, demonstrates that, unlike some of his illustrious col- leagues, Cunningham still has a lot to say in terms of dance and theatre-making. Although his distinctive creative canons and the fundamentals of his technique are easily recognisable throughout the new work, this 45-minute dance is not just a compendium of existing formulae. It is, instead, another step forward in that con- stant exploration of the dance medium that has always informed Cunningham's work. As such, the new dance does not fail to sur- prise the most confident connoisseurs, by confronting them with something com- pletely unexpected and, at the same time, perfectly in line with tradition.
Biped focuses on the constant interaction between the live dancers and figures creat- ed by animation technology. The dancers' movements, transposed into stylised digital images, are projected on to a screen that divides the audience from the live perform- ers, engaging in a choreographic chiaroscuro with their computer-generated counterparts. The result is simply stunning. Canon sequences, juxtapositions and brief unison passages form and dissolve in an intoxicating visual game that goes far beyond the limits of traditional dance, and takes the danced action into a new, still fairly unexplored dimension.
The interaction between projected images and live dancing bodies, however, is not the only key feature of Biped. The work stands out for its particularly rich and fasci- natingly complex movement vocabulary and choreographic architecture. Although the lines, the use of space and motifs remain typically Cunningham's, the density of the choreographic text demonstrates clearly the work of analysis and renovation. The novelties are particularly evident when Biped is compared to either Summerspace or Rainforest, the two dances with which it was paired on different evenings. The com- parison with the former, a 1958 creation, highlights the development of Cunning- ham's choreographic ideas and formulae. In Summerspace, subtitled 'A Lyric Dance', the focus is on the purely classical symme- try of lines, the simplicity of which comple- ments beautifully the pointillist designs by Robert Rauschenberg. The rarefied atmo- sphere, where the intentionally basic sym- metry generates the lyrical atmosphere referred to in the subtitle, contrasts vividly with the equally poignant, yet structurally more complex solutions that occur in Biped. Similarly, the movement vocabulary and the patterns of the 1968 Rainforest, characterised by the presence of floating and bobbing balloons designed by Andy Warhol, differ considerably from the ones seen in Biped, even though they are nearer, in terms of construction, to the 1999 solu- tions than the ones in Summerspace.
As always, the performance was first-rate and the dancers were a sheer pleasure to watch, particularly for the way their danc- ing highlighted both the core components and the less immediately evident nuances of that unique dance idiom that is the Cun- ningham technique.
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