The American choreographer Merce Cunningham loved birds. He painted pictures of them every morning. In Tacita Dean’s evocative film of him at work, made in 2008, the year before his death, birds fly in and out of the frame outside the windows of the Craneway Pavilion in California where he’s rehearsing, their jerky pecks, stalks and poses reflecting the dancers’ movements within.
It’s impossible to watch Beach Birds, created in 1991, without thinking of that film. In this revealing revival, the dancers of Lyon Opera Ballet balance against a pink dawn, slightly swaying as their arms open and curve in clean, slow strokes. The light, randomly programmed, shifts through bright changes to dusk-like orange as the work progresses and the dancers move, never quite in unison, each in their own world, creating sculptural shapes. John Cage’s score eddies around them, full of the rush of a rainstick, of sea sounds.
Unitard costumes by Marsha Skinner give the dancers white bodies and black arms that define the air around them. When they settle into groups, two might stand upright over a third, who makes a loop of his arms and drops forward, leg raised, to touch the floor. A trio of women echo each other’s loping steps from the back of the stage, bodies arched like a single duplicated figure. The mood is tranquil, lovely, infinitely rich.
The music is live, played by the composer Gavin Bryars, his son Yuri, Audrey Riley, James Woodrow and Morgan Goff. Bryars’s presence in the pit feels like an event, particularly for Biped (1999), for which his own score shimmers with melancholy gravity. The piece was developed by Cunningham using the computer software DanceForms, and its explorations are made explicit with a design by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar that projects digital forms and bars of light on to a screen in front of the dancers.
The effects are fascinating, the interaction between the two worlds highlighting differences in weight, space and gravity. At one moment, as the silver-clad dancers arrive in a great rush of movement, straight arms whirring, backs flat in arabesques, the images above them show modelled human forms hanging upside down on a red line of light. It’s complex, complicated, difficult to absorb, but it still looks like the future – albeit one imagined from a distant past. The dancers of Lyon Opera Ballet perform with commitment and energy, honouring the switches of mood and pace.
This Cunningham programme is part of the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections festival that’s filling London with a dizzying array of contemporary international dance. At the Linbury theatre, the exceptional dancer Samantha van Wissen performed a solo looking at an old classic, Giselle, in a new way, offering an animated lecture of movement while speaking from an essay by the writer and director François Gremaud.
Giselle… (the ellipsis in its title differentiate it from the original) breaks down the ballet by retelling the story with a historic gloss, some humour – “It’s odd to wear white to harvest grapes” – and modernist irony: “Finally, she stops in a very sculptural position.”
Van Wissen, who performs in French with surtitles, is an amiable host, and her movement is always riveting – she imitates Mikhail Baryshnikov at one point, flings in Beyoncé at another. But at an unbroken 110 minutes, the event is nearly as long as the ballet itself, and though interesting, it’s not as illuminating as it needs to be.
Star ratings (out of five)
Cunningham Forever (BIPED & Beach Birds) ★★★★
Giselle… ★★★
