As with all our reviews it raids the database and will bring up the other reviews of the Cunningham company, including the latest ones from the UK nationals released this morning (ta to Brendan) - or see the TodaysLinks page of course.

I struggled. But what do others think...

The first Cunningham programme at the Barbican consisted of two works: Fluid Canvas, a world premiere dedicated to Dance Umbrella’s founder, Val Bourne and Interscape , first given in New York two years ago. Fluid Canvas’s backdrop is a digital artwork, whose patterns derive from Cunningham’s wrist movements and the tracked movements of several animals. While these animations seem initially in their turn to animate the choreography, any apparent connection is rapidly sundered. The writing is vintage Cunningham – with its vanishing fleetness, its irresistible poetics, and its very New World staccato restlessness. It is not a completely satisfying piece. Cunningham’s faith in chance can lead to skewed geometries with over-full and ragged ensembles. The score by John King and Takehisa Kosigi compels attention neither in its own right, nor for its complementary value. The graphics sequence, while conceptually imaginative, was underpowered and quite possibly under-funded. Cunningham has made a life’s work of disdaining the credo voiced by EM Forster, ‘Only Connect’. Given his crucial role in the making of the graphic, and his well-flagged fascination with the use of computer graphics in the making of new dances, it would have been satisfying to watch Cunningham draw the linking thread just once.

As with Fluid Canvas , Interscape has captivating moments. It begins as a studio exercise dimly glimpsed through a gauze curtain with a collage by Robert Rauschenberg. The word ‘interscape’ is interestingly redolent of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘inscape’: the inward quality of objects and events, perceived by observation and introspection of the poet, who embodies them in unique poetic forms. Perhaps ‘Inscape’ might have been the better title. ‘Interscape’ has nuances of connection, and, predictably, Cunningham recoils from any such intention. It is almost as if he has a horror of connection: his duets are formal rather than relational, his interest being in shapes and in purity of movement – but determinedly neither in stories nor in rumours of them.

The performance makes heavy demands on one’s attention span. I found it watchable, but not with any continuity and never for very long. There is no easy organising principle. Cunningham is a consummate artist driven by his passion for what he calls ‘the slippery nature of movement itself’. He resists frames, is not - at root - a man of the theatre and probably does not care to be. His legacy is to choreographers ‘without the walls’ and, especially, to those whose chosen medium is film, rather than to those who prefer a stage framed by a proscenium arch.

I think Brendan's quotation in his last paragraph, about Cunningham's endless investigation of 'the slippery nature of movement itself', is the key to what makes this choreographer, especially in his later work, so difficult for many people - me amongst them when it comes to pieces like Fluid Canvas. We all watch dance for our own different reasons, and are 'fed' by different aspects of it, and there are many who will find in late Cunningham little of what they need: no narrative, no political message, no glamour, no big star personalities, no intricate relationship with music - just movement, reduced to as purely abstract a form as is possible when live dancers are performing it.

Cunningham has progressed so far down this path (not many choreographers have had the long life, the resources, and the freedom to refine their ideas like this) that I wondered, whilst watching Fluid Canvas, if he has got to the stage where he no longer needs dancers at all. What do they add, beyond a third dimension, to his computer-generated abstractions? (Some way into the second piece on the programme, one of the dancers smiled, and it was a real shock - these are real people!) Would a video version perhaps make plainer what Cunningham is saying?

Though it's clear that some critics found immense sensuous pleasure in the piece, I would guess they were in a minority, and others found it dry. In any case I don't think most people (me, anyway) have a hope of coming to terms with a piece of such complexity in one viewing - maybe they should do it again at the end of the evening, if the dancers could live through it? It might give those who want to understand it a better chance.

If Merce Cunningham’s first programme at the Barbican was dense and introverted, his second was lively, luminous and engaging. Cunningham, on this evidence, had not gone into the night – but was still reassuringly capable of statements of lyricism, humanity and grace.

The first work, Way Station, was premiered a year ago in New York. A ‘way station’ might be an oasis or a breathing space. If Cunningham was being literal about this, always a risky assumption, the ‘way stations’ here might have been the five papier-mâché tripod sculptures in bright fluorescent colours, designed by Charles Long. A little like jellyfish, they dwarfed the dancers, while also offering canopies for short repose. Such pauses as there were, were short-lived, with fickle sweeps of movement that delighted and frequently overwhelmed the eye. Unlike either of last week’s pieces, the choreography was relational, contrapuntal, even if this was occasionally ‘offset’. It shone with intelligence. Takehisa Kosugi’s score was contemporaneous with the choreography and while it was wilfully unrelated, neither was it obstructive. Most choreographers comment on their chosen music, seeking headroom for an additional gloss or annotation of their own. This is not Cunningham’s way. His dances are not a gloss and he is not prepared to dwell in whatever space may be left to him by a composer. With a mostly non-intrusive score, it was possible, as with neither of the works in the first programme, to absorb the choreography in its unsupported and pure autonomy.

For ‘Loose Time’,the night’s pièce de résistance (and premiered just eight months ago at the University of Berkeley), the curtain rose on a cast dressed in grey-black gauze tights and on a stage backdrop of black netted gauze. The visuals were very primary and industrial, redolent perhaps of a coalmine. The title, “Loose Time”, in an interesting one for Cunningham, in the light of his dissociation of music and choreography: it came from the choreographer’s wish “to cut the time up in a way which was quicker.” Whatever Cunningham meant, the result is clear enough: the piece thumped along with life, contemporary, passionate and engaged – even fiery, absolutely not an old man’s ballet. At other performances, a highlight has been Holly Farmer’s solo: on Saturday night this was heavily abbreviated

The closing work, How to Jump, Kick, Fall and Run, was a revival from 1965. Cunningham and David Vaughan, the company’s archivist (and also author of ‘Frederick Ashton and his Ballets”), sat at the front of the stage, looking for all of the world like Statler and Waldorf, the two cantankerous old men, who heckle the Muppets from a theatre box. They read short passages from John Cage’s
Lecture on Indeterminacy as the dancers heroically acted out a series of light-hearted sports or games in the background. The stories were laconic – and, as with much else in Cunningham, were chosen by chance. The cumulative effect was hilarious (Lake Wobegon meets Ted Shawn?)as the frenetic intensities of the choreography and the geriatric ramblings downstage vied in irrelevance with each other.

Cunningham has been criticised for his reliance on chance. In his favour, it might be argued that rolling the dice offers a route-map away from preconception. Cunningham’s signature is uniquely his own and one which most other choreographers would not care to imitate. However, he is one of dance’s outstanding creators and, on this week’s evidence, he is still at the height of his powers.