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Lyon Opera Ballet 'Beach Birds,' 'Duo,' and 'Grosse Fugue'
March 13, 2010 -- Joyce Theater, New York, NY The refreshing revival of the Mercian masterpiece, "Beach Birds," as interpreted by the Lyon Opera Ballet of France, offered a swell of fresh oddities uncharacteristic of the master’s directive on Friday night at the Joyce. In a poetic semi-abstract narrative of fact over fiction that Cunningham's younger and last company. But, whose fiction and place? The mature Lyons, interprets with strong imagery and freedoms. Lyons’ interpretation was from the heart, the air, and the ground. The company, having been born of a diversified repertory tradition in Europe more inclusive of both modern dance and ballet, overreaches with fresh clarity. Our current American tradition of dance specialization has been known to kill the germ that might bolster its natural-born immunity with impunity by demanding accuracy over authenticity for its own sake in a recent tradition of dance over dancer. In earlier decades many high dance specialists snickered at these mongrel "Euro-hybrid" companies with disdain. Works by Bejart, the overly dramatic Russians, and even the the gaudy Frenchman, Roland Petit brought snickers and scorn to theatre lobbies throughout our linear performance palaces. But it was really the (psycho-sexual) "Trippings" of a "Mayerling," by Macmillian, whose tasteless voyeurism, furied the American dance elite to puritanical rage over thirty-five years ago, that instilled our rigid xenophobia for foreign dance kitsch even though our own super-genius, Graham, worked the "Furious Orgasm" to its sculptural pinnacle publicly many years prior. ( yet,genius is a different story.) As the historical pages and tastes turn, what once looked dark now looks light, as Lyons Opera Ballet's interpretation of Cunningham's masterpiece does. And, although this is not a "Euro-dance," and has American dancers on board, this company feels more relaxed and committed dramatically than our more puritanical dance obsessions.
The Lyons dancers also possess a grounded, natural moderndance weight, as second nature. It’s something imprinted from their adaptions to heavier modern dance choreographers and values throughout the world (like a Jiri Killian, Nijinska, Bausch ,Maguy, or even a Graham). Execution must ape authenticity fast and furiously. In "Beach Birds,” the dancers capture the wonderful lightness of flight with an odd stability and attachment to the ground, demanded in the ideal Cunningham language: like, the evenly twisted and isolated waist, and the four curvatures of the spine, which the great master had adapted within his own ranks too perfection. Even though complete naturalness was not always in order with this company, where, "dancing down" is not the easiest thing to accomplish heavier and more (muscular) work can be accomplished from the outside-in. Lyons took it all on, and succeeded brilliantly in the demands made, giving it an edge and humanity through strength, confidence, and the broad experience it has gained in multiple layers of performance. Lyons is a company not embarrassed by its theatricality within abstraction and that could easily be lost from lack of tougher balletic articulation. Its seems needless to describe the small and large dances in solo, duet, and trio form, the impeccable unison or the miraculous Mercian adagio, the gestural twitching, or the brilliant, but sometimes, uneven executions of performance as blue daylight turned to russet on its simple elongated scrim.Marsha Skinner’s black and white costumes almost magically give the arms the strange effect of wings. by cutting a line between black from white just below the dancers neck and below the armpit. The costumes not only created the illusion of wings, but by split actual stage space itself,, suspending earth from sky. Cage's simple natural score of piano, rain sticks, and violin, completed the beachvscene to perfect contemplative pitch...where we lived and chased amid the many birds of childhood, as our toes sank into the wet Joycean "sand memory"...running to catch the clever elusive winged in flight...(and they knew it and waited)...in that pitch perfect Mercian world--with all its sands, feathers and lotions. A sensitivity captured and given to us from the poetry of Cunningham's starry genius as pure perfection.
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by Robert Streicher
Lyons has a maturity, weight, and elevation of the experienced type that gave weightlessness to “Beach Birds” through an articulation and strength to the legs that I haven't seen outside of the master's jumping itself, in 1967... and I think the secret word is, "balon," an elevation at the top of the jump, which pushes its logistics upward-and suspends in mid-air and finally equals an illusion of the defiance of gravity.