Last time Jules Cunningham worked with a famous musician it was dancing with Spice Girl Mel C on How Did We Get Here? This time, it’s Le Tigre’s JD Samson. A genre swerve on the collab front, but all the while, Cunningham stays true to their own path as a creator of very formal, understated dance that invariably piques your curiosity.
In Crow, Samson is installed behind a mixing desk on the vast Sadler’s Wells East stage, playing bubbling electronics, fizzy sounds and pulsating bass. Cunningham and dancer Harry Alexander meanwhile are dressed in long boots and short dresses, warming up with a strut. Crow is inspired by queer American composers Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman and a particular (undocumented) performance of theirs from the 1970s. Cunningham takes the idea of outsiders and marginalisation, and compares it to birds living in hostile urban spaces. At one stage the three performers gather and turn an inquisitive and accusatory stare on the audience; it is very much like being eyeballed by a gang of crows.
With their mastery of the body’s geometry, their skill for the precision control of exacting choreography, Cunningham and Alexander are two of the most zen-like, brilliant dancers. You can see them watching each other, sometimes mirroring, sometimes chasing an idea round the stage. There’s bemusement and seriousness, rigour and play, details like the slide of a toe along the ground in sync with two falling quavers in the score that gives the effect of a question mark, or a raised eyebrow. It’s an avant-garde delight.
Pigeons features five dancers and is set to Eastman’s 1980 piece Gay Guerilla, the sound of several pianos layering up the same chord. It’s music that expands and shifts while staying on the spot. The dancers, however, are always moving, in unison, canon or counterpoint; they cluster and part, like pigeons do, performing their very particular footwork, motoring on by their own logic. It’s mildly hypnotic. Cunningham was a longtime dancer with the legendary Merce Cunningham (no relation) and you can’t help but spot the link with Merce’s Beach Birds, performed last week as part of the Dance Reflections festival, just shifted into Jules’ own world, own time.
At Sadler’s Wells East, London, until 28 March. The Dance Reflections festival continues until 8 April. How Did We Get Here? is available online until 31 March.
