Galas and anniversaries rarely featured in the life of the late and very great Merce Cunningham. Making work was always more important to him than marking occasions. And while he agreed to make an exception for his 90th birthday, the title of the piece he choreographed, Nearly Ninety, pragmatically allowed for the possibility that he might not live to see the actual day.
In fact, he died just three months later. The poignancy of seeing what is now Cunningham's final work is intensified by the discovery that it contains some of the most limpidly beautiful movement of his career. Imaginatively, he was far from exhausted. The opening duets fire a quiver of sharp arrowy moves that settle into moments of exquisite quietness, as a man lays his head against the lifted leg of his partner, or two bodies fold into a hieratic embrace. Even better are solos of ecstatic, concentrated clarity where skittering footwork beats against curving body shapes or where a dancer simply holds the stage in a radiantly unfolding adagio.
But this spare, lovely material is extended well beyond its natural length, and comes framed with music and design of bullying self-importance. Initially, the work's monumental steel set is seen only in silhouetted darkness and flashing light; it looks like a space station, floating in a dimension beyond the dance. But in the second half it becomes overbearingly visible, intruding on the dance. Even more culpable is the score. Jointly composed by John Paul Jones, Takehisa Kosugi and Sonic Youth, it builds to a bombastic level of noise that makes the choreography almost unwatchable. It was the key to Cunningham's aesthetic creed that his collaborators were given complete creative freedom. It's unfortunate that for this final work those collaborators got it so badly wrong.
