Jump, skip, and away!

Les Arts Sauts and Merce Cunningham in New York

by Marcia B. Siegel

Ever since Loie Fuller dematerialized herself with colored lights on floating veils, technology has generated a paradox in the theater. For all its pragmatic utility, science has enabled artists to attain almost supernatural levels of fantasy and abstraction. During the last week of New York's Lincoln Center Festival, the French trapeze company Les Arts Sauts and the venerable avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham took us to new realms of machine-assisted unreality.

Les Arts Sauts ("The Arts of Jumping") is more than your usual circus act. Their flying equipment is rigged on a fairly standard metal scaffolding, but the whole piece Kayassine takes place inside an inflatable dome. After entering through an airlock, the audience sits in tilted-back lawn chairs with comfortable foam headrests, so you're looking up into a 60-foot sky. But it's not like being outdoors. With the quiet hiss of air that's constantly being pumped in to keep the dome deployed, and a darkly luminous smoke drifting up into the void, you seem to be enclosed in a hermetic space where the normal limits don't apply.

In the first part of the piece, the space is empty except for a long swag of white silk (circus people call this a cloud swing), like a beam of light from the zenith. There's a woman hanging in it who reaches out and twines sensually around the cloth. Then amorphous shapes start to fly in toward the light and disappear again into the void, like meteors, gone before you can really see them. These heavenly bodies are the men in the troupe, arriving to cavort for a while with the woman in the cloud swing (Sara Sandqvist).

This celestial spectacular was matched by a more mundane one, about halfway through the piece, when the huge metal truss with the trapezes on it rose majestically from the floor to the top of the dome. Spatial proportions dramatically returned to normal, and you saw how high and how really risky this enterprise was. With the equipment locked in place, and a net underneath for insurance, the performers transformed again, from astral bodies into humanoids, tumbling outside the grip of gravity.

The rest of the show was all trapeze. The men -- divided into flyers and catchers -- launched themselves from a swinging bar to grab the arms of their approaching partners, sometimes doing a midair somersault or split kick, just to keep things interesting. The 11 men -- plus Sandqvist, who did a catch and a flight or two but had a minor role in this part of the piece -- perched around in the top of the structure, watching, commenting, and getting into action from swings and ropes that appeared in unexpected places. People sometimes missed their connections and fell into the net, to the audience's delighted gasps.

Besides the thrill-ridden conventions of the trapeze work itself, Kayassine had elements of theater -- many of the performers previously worked with Cirque du Soleil -- and Hervé LeLardoux was brought in as a directorial coordinator for the collectively created routines. The piece felt a bit like a big Italian circus, commedia dell'arte style. All the performers wore odd, non-matching costumes and hair fashions, not credited to any designer, that made them look like a troupe of zanies and also helped the audience distinguish one high rider from another. There were clownish scramblings and crooked falls, and hearty, comradely welcomes for successful returns to the launching platform. At the end, each performer took a bow by diving with individual panache into the net.

Kayassine was accompanied throughout by vocalist Pascale Valenta and musicians Benoit Fleutey on cello, Christophe LeLarge on double bass, and Patrice Wojciechowski on jew's harp. Their evocative, multi-ethnic music, unattributed to any composer, added another dimension to the other-worldly atmosphere of the work.

Another kind of alternative universe was proposed in the new dance BIPED by choreographer Merce Cunningham and his high-tech collaborators: Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser (animation), Suzanne Gallo (costumes), Aaron Copp (lighting), and Gavin Bryars (music). Together they set up an interplay of real and graphic figures within the big stage of the New York State Theater. Cunningham always says he lets his collaborators go their own way, so that accidental relationships between independently created elements can enliven each performance. It's hard to imagine BIPED was made entirely according to this rule -- either the principals consulted more closely than usual to make an integrated work, or I've gotten so used to the concept of randomness that just about any collage looks intentional.

Eshkar and Kaiser use a technique called motion capture, which registers a person's moves into a computer. There they become the basis for animation and other types of graphic manipulation. Motion capture has been used in professional sports and other amply bankrolled undertakings, but Cunningham was the first to seize on its potential for dance. Its basic look is like an artist's sketch of a dance in progress. This has been shown in museum installations over the past year or so, but BIPED is the first piece I know of that combines the animation product with live dancing.

A scrim across the proscenium serves as a transparent medium. The animations are projected onto it, and we can see through it, to the dancers beyond. As the dancers circle and leap through the deep inner space, dancing sketches surround and accompany them and disappear. Vertical lines on the scrim slide apart and together like an accordion; then an animated figure appears from "behind" one of the lines and dances in the new space created as the next line moves away. The animations sometimes seem to be far away, and as small as the dancers in the stage; just as you forget they're not part of the company, they grow into surrealistic giants.

They don't always resemble bodies; they can be like disassembled haystacks that slip together, or rows of drifting bubbles. One enormous set of skeletal images is slowed so drastically that the motion overlaps in undulating traces, and later the dancers cross the stage in exaggerated slow motion. Six women jump through the space while two projected figures with upside-down alter egos dance along projected ramps to frame them, like a ghostly corps de ballet. Near the end, the women rise and sink slowly into plié while multicolored sticks drift down the scrim and the music modulates electronically from chord to chord in a gradual crescendo and decrescendo.

Cunningham's dances don't have narrative structures or conventionally arched movement phrases that leave shapes in your memory. In that sense, they resemble one another. What he's interested in is developing dance material, within a very consistent compositional process. But he keeps pushing for new stimuli, new ways to create movement, arrange and present it. Animation, the latest in a long line of innovative devices, has contributed to one of his most beautiful and surprising works.

Technology aside, Cunningham's movement ideas have gradually changed quite a lot, and so has the look of the dances. Opening night at the State Theater showed how his sensibility could vary during four decades of dancemaking. There was the calm, sparse Summerspace of 1958 (revived by former Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown for the New York City Ballet), the hyperactive and menacing 1975 company work Sounddance, and the new BIPED and Occasion Piece.

Summerspace was done for a season in the '60s by New York City Ballet, then dropped. I wondered what NYCB would look like in it now. The work is always referred to as pointillist, from Robert Rauschenberg's pastel-spotted backdrop and leotards and Morton Feldman's Ixion, where the orchestra sounds like birds tuning up at 5 a.m. I thought it was fine to see the NYCB dancers sprinkling themselves through their home stage, which is usually so much more formal and contained. But they couldn't quite achieve the Cunningham movement style. They seemed to lack a sense of being secure in their torsos, of starting their movement from the pelvis and the back, so they looked leggy and a bit stiff. Instead of being attentive to their surroundings and their companions, they often turned their focus inward, as though looking for a continuity they weren't finding in the steps.

Occasion Piece was just that, a momentary chance for the audience to get a look at Cunningham himself, his big box-office guest Mikhail Baryshnikov, and the set pieces modeled by Jasper Johns after Duchamp's The Large Glass (originally they were the set for Cunningham's Walkaround Time). A prepared piano score by John Cage was played by Stephen Drury. It was a strange experience.

The octogenarian Cunningham stayed partly behind the set, pulling up a creaky arm, testing his ancient legs, glancing intently at his partner across the stage. Baryshnikov, trim but no longer young, seemed to be demonstrating, carefully, almost privately, a few steps, some quick jumps, some strenuous multidirectional gestures. He'd pause in between, glance back at the master, who was never looking at him at the same time. The brief dance had a lot of spare time in it, time to think about what it means to perform, and what it means to watch performers, for a lifetime.

Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar will appear at Mass MoCA this Saturday, July 31, at 5 p.m. to demonstrate and talk about motion-capture technology. For reservations, call (413) 662-2111.