Eighty-five-years-old and smiling beatifically, Merce Cunningham unexpectedly teeters out for the curtain call. The audience erupts. Here is the world's greatest living choreographer out of his wheelchair just for them.
Edinburgh struck lucky this weekend. After an absence of 10 years, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was in town to reveal the world premiere of Views on Stage. Watching the harmony of a Cunningham performance, it is always difficult to believe that the separate elements, including choreography and music, are made in isolation, only coming together once they are complete. On this occasion, the process has been highlighted by showing one element at a time on a tour of five cities. So Sheffield premiered the choreography, Salford the design, Warwick the lighting and Oxford the costumes. John Cage's compositions, both created in the 1980s, were performed in Brighton for the first time.
The totality, connected at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre, creates a beautiful, softly, softly production. The great white balls of acclaimed Brazilian installation artist Ernesto Neto hang like wacky soft stalactites above the motion, all pendulous, super-size fiddly bits. Lighting gently changes the colour of this benign setting as a piano plonks out John Cage's disconnected notes. And the dancers dance. Reconfiguring joints and making oval arms in inimitable style, they move like plants growing on time-delay film. Despite a wobble here and there in some of the first night performances, Views on Stage is a compilation of industrious hieroglyphs that give no indication that the grand man of dance is easing up.
Biped, made in 1999 and sharing the bill, is like sitting in front of a window of snowflakes, cosy inside. Or gazing into space. It is a gently sci-fi world of black holes and shiny bodysuits. Dancers dissolve into blackness and in the foreground, meteor showers of lines and spheres are computer generated into constellations.
Defying infirmity, Cunningham now uses computer software to choreograph. Biped hijacks some of his virtual dancers, twirling them in spooky perfection in the dark space between company and audience. Thirteen dancers, half an alphabet, make the language of Cunningham live.
