MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY

ZELLERBACH HALL, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA APRIL 23 AND 24, 1999

Barely a week after his eightieth birthday, Merce Cunningham premiered one of his most radiant creations yet. As expansive and mysterious as Ocean (1994), Biped is also one of this master choreographer's more lyrical endeavors, along the lines of last year's Pond Way, which, with the 1993 CRWDSPCR, completed the second of the company's annual San Francisco Bay Area programs.

Using recently developed motion-capture technology, Biped was performed behind a scrim on which animated imagery by visual artists Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser was projected. The two of them had digitally recorded the dancing of three members of the Cunningham company and reconstituted the information into phantom dancers, or parts thereof, that would streak across the scrim's surface like comets in the night sky. At times they seem to compete with the live dancers and at others to partner them.

This moving calligraphy was complemented by floating bubbles, vertical lines of varying width and color, and tiny Rubik's Cube-like configurations, all setting up their own rhythmic patterns. The effect was one in which the dancers seemed to exist in a pulsating space that was in constant flux, which embraced and dwarfed performers in turn. It was particularly stunning in solo passages in which a lone figure could look minuscule one moment, yet have something like human-sized dimensions the next.

Cunningham's choreography for the fifteen dancers in this darkly luminous environment was surprisingly balletic. Dressing them in short, multicolored metallic unitards (by Suzanne Gallo) that reflected the strong side lights (by Aaron Copp), the choreographer made frequent use of unison passages, dividing and pairing the dancers along gender lines. They also seemed to slide and stride across the stage on half-pointe more often than not. It underlined their elevation even as it emphasized a sense of floating ephemerality.

Biped started with a lone male stepping out of the lights in the wings to be joined by a group of women materializing from the blackness at the back of the stage. It was a motif that was repeated again and again: high-level energy contrasted with being gently spilled out of, and sucked into, velvety darkness.

In the middle of the piece the dancers, for a few moments, donned gray dusters, darkening their glittering costumes with penumbral shadows. The women were finger-turned by their partners, only to fall against them and then twirl away on their own. At another paint Cunningham arranged a series of couples in a semicircle, each of which engaged in its own set of sculptural encounters. They looked like nothing so much as a nod to Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer.

Gavin Bryars's soft clouds of sound clusters, performed live under the composer's direction, seemed as if they had been composed to Cunningham's specifications, which, of course, they hadn't been. Like all the other elements of Biped, the music had been created independently. Seeing this wondrously unified piece of work, I find that hard to believe.