Merce Cunningham: Biped (1999)

Merce Cunningham - Biped
by rybthr

Music: Gavin Bryars, Biped
Décor: Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar
Costumes: Suzanne Gallo
Lighting: Aaron Copp

BIPED is a full company work whose duration is forty-five minutes. Cunningham worked on the choreography during 1997 and 1998. Parts of it were performed in Events at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts during the summer of 1998 as a Work in Progress. The first performance took place at Cal Performances' Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus in April 1999.

Cunningham has written: "The dance gives me the feeling of switching channels on the TV.... The action varies from slow formal sections to rapid broken-up sequences where it is difficult to see all the complexity." Many people have commented on what appears to be the profoundly elegiac nature of the piece, particularly its closing moments.

The costumes, using a metallic fabric that reflects light, were designed by the late Suzanne Gallo. At one point in the dance the men, clothed in pajama-like outfits in a transparent fabric, bring on tops in the same fabric for the women. Cunningham had asked Gallo for "something different," and this was her solution. Aaron Copp, the dance company's lighting designer, devised the lighting, dividing the stage floor into squares that were lit in what looked like a random sequence, as well as the curtained booths at the back of the stage that permit the dancers seemingly to appear and disappear. BIPED was filmed in performance in France under the direction of Charles Atlas in 1999.