The American choreographer Merce Cunningham loved birds. He painted pictures of them every morning. In Tacita Dean’s evocative film of him at work, made in 2008, the year before his death, birds fly in and out of the frame outside the windows of the Craneway Pavilion in California where he’s rehearsing, their jerky pecks, stalks and poses reflecting the dancers’ movements within.
It’s impossible to watch Beach Birds, created in 1991, without thinking of that film. In this revealing revival, the dancers of Lyon Opera Ballet balance against a pink dawn, slightly swaying as their arms open and curve in clean, slow strokes. The light, randomly programmed, shifts through bright changes to dusk-like orange as the work progresses and the dancers move, never quite in unison, each in their own world, creating sculptural shapes. John Cage’s score eddies around them, full of the rush of a rainstick, of sea sounds.
