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A vast artificial sun of yellow sodium lamps is installed at the far end of the hall: the entire ceiling is mirrored making the space seem even more immense. A fine mist is dispersed into the air, so that the lighting has a hazy, smoky effect. There are three dance spaces dispersed around the hall, linked by walkways. The musicians are up on a balcony: your best view of them is reflected in the ceiling. This is intended as a promenade event, to be experienced as you choose, staying in one spot to view a few dancers at a time, or moving around to look at different perspectives – a group close up with a tangential view on a group further away. Or you might like to take it all in as one couple did by laying flat on the floor and watching it all reflected, distantly, in the roof.

It’s not your average dance performance by any means, though if anyone is capable of making sense of such a challenging environment, Merce Cunningham would be your man. There are frustrations as well as plus points of the format. The plus points are seeing some of the dancers close up, just a few feet away, and appreciating just how fine their control and co ordination is. Sometimes its interested to be reminded that there is no ‘front’ or ‘side’ to a performance and that the view of a dancers’ backs can be just as rewarding as a front view, and just as carefully crafted. At other moments, you may be convinced that something more interesting is going on in another space and you just can’t take it all in. There’s plenty of space so it is possible always to walk around and get another perspective. However, it is a fragmentary experience: it’s difficult to see if ideas and themes are being developed.
 

Your reactions to it may be very much determined by what you think of the installation itself, because this cannot help but affect your perception of the work. The sun is a huge, dominant image, and the setting so vast that everything on a human scale is dwarfed. The yellow light becomes progressively more weird. All colours are leached out by it so that after a while you see everything in sepia. One curious effect was that the dancers when in a performance space were illuminated by a white light which showed up the green, white and purple of their costumes. As soon as they stepped out of the performance area they turned brown and grey – a magical but peculiarly unsettling effect. The dances in the area immediately below the huge disk for me took on the air of some ancient ritual, or some ceremony for the sun god: tiny humans making hopeful, significant gestures in the face of unwavering natural forces (except of course they aren’t natural: you can walk behind the sun and see how it’s constructed).

Among the dance sections I was able to follow a few fragments stood out for me: a section for a Japanese dancer and two female companions dancing tightly interlocked figures in the central space which for some reason made me think of Apollo and the muses, though there was no direct reference to this. Also a short but oddly tender duet for a couple where he lay on the ground supporting her weight as she slowly toppled over him. These seemed strong and striking passes where the dancers commanded attention, pulling the gaze away from the immensity of the surroundings to a more human scale. Otherwise at times the competing demands of the squalling electronic score and the diffuseness of the presentation made it difficult to concentrate and take it all in.

You won’t see anything like this in a hurry, so it is a worthwhile visit. It is only forty minutes long. At its first performance the applause was rather perfunctory: it seemed to stop rather than end, and the audience seemed slightly bemused. It’s a distinctly odd experience, but a memorable one.