Begin Anywhere
Space Upstairs, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Since Merce Cunningham’s death, in 2009, the choreographer’s trust has allowed other dance companies to license performances of his work, but under strict conditions and usually under the watchful scrutiny of one of his former dancers.
John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre has been granted permission to perform single pieces in the past, but recent discussions and workshops with Patricia Lent, one of the trust’s directors, led to the creation of a new work: Four Solos by Merce Cunningham is an arrangement of dances spanning 22 years and performed as a continuous whole to original music by John King.
This idea of combining pieces isn’t the loosening of aesthetic stipulations that it may seem; rather, it’s something Cunningham might well have done himself. Not averse to using movements from one dance in another, he revelled in chance. The toss of a dice or the I Ching could determine the structure of a piece, changing night after night. He believed that dance, music and decor were independent and should just coexist onstage.
Performed individually – but dovetailed – the solos retain their individuality but collectively highlight the lasting beauty of Cunningham’s movement language.
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Solo, from 1975, danced by Boris Charrion, is based on animal movements that Cunningham observed at San Diego Zoo. Its lunging jumps and scurrying steps appear shockingly wild following the more formally upright 50 Looks, from 1979, a series of poses performed by Magdalena Hylak. François Malbranque perfectly captures complexity and contortions in Changeling, from 1957, and returns for an extract from RainForest, a 1968 piece.
Throughout all of the works a joyful asymmetry is formed by different parts of the body, each limb, head and torso acting independently. The expected Newtonian cause and effect is absent, so expected momentum is suddenly halted, or a jump lands but the body pivots immediately elsewhere. The overall effect is a seductive unpredictability from moment to moment, yet always articulated in a crystal-clear vocabulary.
Adding the dancers Vinícius Martins Araújo and Adam O’Reilly, Begin Anywhere (which was commissioned by the Irish Arts Centre in New York, where it premiered in February) highlights the group rather than the individual.
Created by Scott and the composer Mel Mercier as a homage to the spirit of Cunningham and his musical collaborator John Cage, it opens with a slow, concentrated solo by Hylak to audio by Danny McCarthy played on a portable cassette player.
This sets the tone for the rest of the work, in which the individual music contributions – by Mercier, Kevin McNally, Mick O’Shea and Caoimhe Ní Fhlatharta – are blinkered and random, but the choreography is united and premeditated.
Indeed, it is difficult to recall a work of Scott’s with so much formality: unison movements, canons and clear patterns. Together with Joe Levasseur’s lighting, the overall effect is a celebration of the contrasting simplicity and complexity that underpin the artistic vision of Cunningham and Cage.
Begin Anywhere is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until Saturday, March 15th; and at Civic Theatre, Tallaght, on Tuesday, March 18th
