Review: Lyon Opera Ballet in Merce Cunningham Forever: Beach Birds / Biped

Although Merce Cunningham died in 2009, aged 90, and the dance company that bore his name ceased its business two years’ later, it is pleasing to see that his work is still alive and most certainly kicking! His legacy survives in many places, but none more faithfully preserved than by Lyon Opera Ballet where one of Cunningham’s former dancers, Cédric Andrieux, is now artistic director.

Hot on the heels of reviving a work by Trisha Brown, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels has commissioned the Lyon company to perform two works by Cunningham under the banner of Merce Cunningham Forever, their creation dating to either end of the 1990s: Beach Birds (1991) and Biped (1999), the latter choreographed by Cunningham at the age of 80.

Beach Birds is a thoroughly charming work, made all the more so by Marsha Skinner’s striking full-body unitards that are white from the chest downwards with a block of black extending across the neck and shoulders and out into gloved hands. The costume and the initial tableau of the dancers standing erect, heads facing in different directions, immediately gave the image of wading birds, untroubled at dawn, in a tidal pool aside the beach.

As the work progresses, those impactful black stripes accentuate the dancers’ port de bras to enhance the idea of birds’ wings with the visual imagery of them contemplating flight, even more emphasised by the hands being covered in those black gloves, mimicking the claws of a bird. For a native New Yorker (albeit born in Washington) Cunningham often turned to the inspiration of nature for his work although not ever as starkly as here: three years’ after Beach Birds, Cunningham made Ocean, which I recall being performed at London’s Roundhouse some 20 or so years ago, a work in which there is not a scintilla of reference to the sea (or, indeed, water of any kind). By contrast, Beach Birds is an entirely evocative representation of nature.

The dancers are magnificent creatures: bending, hopping, balancing, their erect posture always with understated bird-like head and arm movements. Their discipline is intense, but their performance belies this robustness by achieving an aura of relaxed spontaneity. The combination of Cunningham’s movement and John Cage‘s music evokes the ideal of wading birds foraging by the sea. It’s a modern classic, beautifully performed.

I confess to being less enamoured of Biped, which although made eight years later seems dated. Cunningham was way ahead of his time in terms of multi-media engagement and the use of computers to influence movement (an expansion of his well-documented use of chance to determine the construction of a performance). When it was made, Biped pioneered Cunningham’s invention of “motion capture” in a fusion of computer and video technology matched with movement. In 1999, it was at the front end of the digital revolution in dance but – just like the original Apple Mac or the modem – it is far from state-of-the-art, now.

To my mind, the motion-captured video projections of bodies patterned by their musculature onto a downstage scrim was an unnecessary intervention between the audience and the live dancers. The intention, I think, was to engender a greater appreciation of the live dancing but for this viewer it had the opposite effect.

That being said, Biped has an impactful beginning in a series of solos with dancers succeeding one another by appearing or dissolving into the upstage black curtains. The forms eventually multiply with the dancers seemingly entering a hall of mirrors. The mix of live and digital performance manages to suggest both a vintage and a futuristic world. Once again, one marvelled at the Lyon ensemble’s artistry, if not the digital imposters who sometimes stood in their way. Biped is a vital piece of dance history but one that doesn’t necessarily stand the test of time.

Graham Watts

Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA).  He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.

He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv.  He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.