When dancers become choreographers they rarely find their voices straight away. There’s usually an evolutionary stage, where you see in their work the visual echoes of the choreographers who have influenced them. Julie Cunningham spent 10 years dancing for Merce Cunningham in New York, and then a further three with Michael Clark in London. You can see the imprint of these highly individual dance-makers in Cunningham’s lean, eloquent body, and in her first two creations as director of her own company.
Both employ spoken text to explore ideas of transformation, and of the dissolution of binary notions of gender. The first, Returning, opens to Björk’s Atom Dance. The lights come up on Cunningham and her three other dancers in form-fitting costumes devised by herself and by Stevie Stewart, who designs for Michael Clark. The movement, with its bunny-hops, hip articulations and high-framing arms, is Clarkian too. But then Cunningham and Clark are birds of a feather. Leggy, ballet-trained dancers who felt, at some visceral level, that ballet’s protocol was not for them.
Dance is an endless process of transmission. If Clark is echoed in Cunningham’s delicately appropriated classicism, and Merce Cunningham in her quasi-organic groupings, that’s not to say that this is unoriginal work. It’s passionately felt, and there’s a thread running through it that’s unique to its maker. The problem with Returning, and with the evening’s second piece, To Be Me, is that both are set to spoken word extracts of such force and specificity that the dance comes across as a subordinate, illustrative element.
Much of Returning is set to Future Feminism, by Antony and the Johnsons. This is a longish recitation referencing, among other subjects, menstruation and lunar tides, the intractability of the Catholic church vis-a-vis homosexuality, and the possible reincarnation of the Dalai Lama as a girl. It’s heartfelt stuff, but the problem with it in this context is that Cunningham’s dance is left with nowhere to go, and little to say.
Dance is most effective as a language when it deploys soft power. Ambiguity, nuance and ellipsis. Apply hard focus, and like something glimpsed peripherally in the near-dark, it vanishes. To Be Me is set to poems spoken by the rapper Kate Tempest, and based around the ancient Greek myth of the gender-changing seer Tiresias. Cunningham and Alexander Williams, similar in height and both with close-cropped hair, mirror each other’s moves. They back together, dissolve into each other, and then are forced apart by Harry Alexander and Hannah Burfield, who presumably represent the forces of heteronormativity. “You are more man when you break and weep,” Tempest declaims, when Alexander has sundered the pair.
The evening’s best sequence is a solo by Cunningham, all skyward reaches and precision-crafted arabesques, descriptive of quiet longing. But its subtlety is washed away on the flood-tide of the poetry. “The best girls would fuck like a man given half a chance,” Tempest cries. No doubt, but I’d rather the dance had told me so.
