It was hard to watch the Cunningham company after Merce's death in 2009, knowing his benignly smiling figure would be absent from the curtain call. It's twice as hard now that they are to disband in December this year. Yet in the clever opening programme of their final season, Cunningham seems everywhere – and his presence becomes more vivid the further we get from the present.
Pond Way (1998) is typical of Cunningham's late style: dense activity of blips, quirks and angles chasing through the dancers' bodies. Some of the choreography looks too complex to be human, yet, as the title suggests, it is alive with other imagery. In the hum and thrum of the dancing you catch sight of water insects, dipping birds, ripples of current, and there are moments of luminous clarity when you imagine Cunningham himself, in sunlight, by the water's edge.
In Second Hand (1970), Cunningham again dominates. He originally danced the central role now performed by Robert Swinston (who at times uncannily resembles the older Cunningham). Cage's piano score is a brutally spare reduction of Satie's Socrate; with equal spareness, the choreography invokes the loneliness of a man facing death. He marks out his space in a long, painfully withdrawn solo, from which he emerges to dance a last duet, before weaving a slow path through a chorus of heedless younger dancers. It is highly poignant to watch now, as well as formally remarkable: huge, dark emotions compressed within the most rigorous of structures.
Finally, in Antic Meet (1958), we encounter Cunningham in his iconoclastic prime. This vaudeville-style masterpiece, created with Robert Rauschenberg, is pure dada: a man dances with a chair strapped to his back, then swaps it for a jumper with five arms and no neck. Women in sunglasses dance absurd parodies of Martha Graham; Balanchine and 19th-century ballet are equally lampooned. The timing is impeccable, the jokes delicious. Sixty years on, it is still funny, outrageous and fresh.
