Ponds are a form of life: marshes, water lilies, a paradise for birds, endless layers of different activities.
Merce Cunningham
When faced with the décor of Pond Way, it is difficult to doubt the importance of the collaboration between the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and major contemporary painters. Presented for the first time at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra in Paris, in 1998, the ballet has as its backdrop an enlargement of a painting by Roy Lichtenstein entitled Landscape with Boat. Usually the sets created for Cunningham are originals. But Lichtenstein died, in 1997, before completing the canvas that the choreographer had commissioned after seeing the exhibition of his Landscapes in the Chinese Style, inspired by the monotype landscapes of Edgar Degas. So it was Lichtenstein’s wife who authorized the choice of one of the pre-existing Landscapes and this fell on Landscape with Boat.
The oriental charm of the Pond Way backdrop (in one corner you will notice the small effigy of a boatman, a distinctive sign of the old Japanese prints so dear to the Impressionists) seems to reverberate in the white, Persian-style costumes designed for the thirteen performers of the choreography by Suzanne Gallo, and in the warm and meditative sounds of Brian Eno's music (titled New Ikebukuro), intended for three performers who set into action, at their pleasure, the three CDs on which it is recorded. To resist the temptation to find a premeditated expressive convergence between the different languages of this staging, it will be enough to note how the sounds, similar to the voices of seagulls and the noise of moorings (gongs and bells), meet the teeming vivacity of the choreography. Full of tense movements (stretching of the limbs), occasional jolts of the torso, jumps with raised knees, the dance of Pond Way, although subtly sensual, has nothing oriental. Rather, it seems to echo the suggestions of its title and Cunningham’s brief and poetic notes on the various activities that animate the microcosm of a pond. In fact, like the previous Beach Birds (1991) and Rainforest (1968), Pond Way also belongs to Cunningham’s so-called “nature studies”: ballets that perhaps more than others demonstrate the particular permeable quality of the American master’s abstract dance and his ability to receive external stimuli without ever translating them into a narrative discourse that hinders or imprisons the free flow – ideally unpremeditated thanks to chance operations – of movements.
