Merce Cunningham Dance Company

This performance of Nearly Ninety at the Dance Umbrella festival is part of the Legacy Tour, which over two years will take 18 works by Cunningham to 40 cities in America and Europe. This will be the last chance to see Cunningham’s choreography performed live by dancers he personally trained before the company closes at the end of next year.

Characteristically challenging and uncompromising, this piece is pure dance with no narrative or scenario, so it is difficult to place it in context or interpret its meaning. Twelve dancers, sometimes in male/female duets, but also in solos and ensembles, in perform a series of intricately detailed angular movements, often with different dances going on at same time. Seemingly struggling to maintain balance, as if floating in space, initially there is a sense of disconnection but ultimately they come together in a triumphant affirmation of the human spirit.

With the performers wearing Romeo Gigli’s skin-tight white costumes with dark- grey stripes, like alternative, slightly robotic Trekkies, there is a strongly futuristic feel to the work, enhanced when after 20 minutes in, a semi-transparent curtain rises to reveal an otherworldly, multi-level steel structure by Benedetta Tagliabue. Suggesting a spaceship or temple, it houses six musicians playing live, rotating to allow different perspectives. Near the end, a dancer ascends the staircase and a platform lowers for her to perform a solo above the other dancers on stage, like a high priest overseeing some strangely mystical ritual, a joyously transcendent occasion.

The musicians are very much centre stage, playing an eerily electronic score by John Paul Jones, Takehisa Kosugi and Sonic Youth, with keyboards, guitars, flute, saxophone and percussion, like music from the planets, sometimes rising urgently to a disturbing climax, then subsiding again into atmospheric mystery. Franc Aleu’s video shows distorted close-ups of dancers and musicians performing, while Brian MacDevitt’s sudden shafts of light provide penetrating moments of illumination.

Although the show is rather self-indulgently long at 110 minutes (including interval), and the set and music may seem overbearing, Nearly Ninety is still an intriguing, fully fledged example of Cunningham’s artistic credo.

In one of those weird coincidences, Cunningham died about the same time last year as another famous dance pioneer, Pina Bausch, whose company Tanztheater Wuppertal is performing the dance-opera Iphigenia in Tauris at Sadler’s Wells this week. Now being run by two of her close assistants, they will continue to revive Bausch’s work, and no doubt produce new work by other choreographers. But for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, next autumn at the Barbican will be their final stop in Britain on what has been an epic voyage of discovery.

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