Just a click of the light

Merce Cunningham's work is still bizarre - only now he does it with computers

Merce Cunningham Dance Company Barbican, London EC2
Random Dance Company Greenwich Dance Agency, SE10

John Cage defined choreography as the art of moving without bumping into anything unless you mean to. Merce Cunningham (who paid tribute to Cage after the composer's death by standing still for 4mins 33secs) is content with that Cowardly dictum. At the Barbican, dancers bumped into Andy Warhol's helium balloons (in RainForest, 1968) and let electronically animated figures bump into them (in Biped, 1999).

Cunningham, now 81, has found his way round the obstacle of his arthritis by using virtual dancers to work out his choreography. He no longer needs to demonstrate what he wants. He experiments instead with LifeForms software, testing his ideas on the computer screen before transposing them on to real-life performers. The dances thus created are unpredictable, bizarrely beautiful - but then, so is his pre-computer choreography, as RainForest and Summerspace (1958) testified.

Summerspace is a Cunningham primer. He lets you see the architecture of the piece, without ornamentation. It is based simply on stepping: giant paces, lunges, linked chané turns. The dancers hold still as though their bare feet were suckers, gripping the stage. Then, like Robert Rauschenberg's dotty designs, they float off into space.

RainForest is far stranger. Its six flesh-coloured inhabitants move as arbitrarily as the silver-foil pillows drifting about them. Robert Swinston has the feral alertness of a forest creature; Jeannie Steele coils like a liana. They leap without preparation, as though their in-between moves had been elided by a video-maker or computer programmer.

For Biped , digital designers Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser created a decor of light illusions. These must be the most precisely tailored designs Cunningham has ever commissioned. Bars of light contribute to the fluid architecture of the piece, expanding and contracting the space in which the dancers move. Spectral figures stride in mid-air, performing the same choreography as the solid bodies below. They are in fact the same bodies, etherealised through motion capture.

Light-sensitive sensors were attached to two dancers' limbs, whose movements were recorded digitally. The sketchy outlines thus generated are not so much computer fantasies as 3-D phantoms of real people. Perhaps because they are so ephemeral, their presence is far less distracting than film or video images. You soon learn to see through them in order to focus on the extraordinary shapes the flesh-and-blood dancers make.

Soloists are multiplied, mirrored, refracted by their fellows. They could be children at play, haunted by ghosts, or iridescent insects. Unlike lucid Summerspace, Biped 's logic is fuzzy: nothing is as simple as it seems. Variations on themes unravel and are knitted up again. Gavin Bryars's luscious score is sometimes sepulchral, sometimes ecstatic. By the end, a requiem has been celebrated.

Wayne McGregor invites comparison with Cunningham by appearing in the same Dance Umbrella week and taking part, today, in a live chat room (at the ICA and at with digital artists. Yet McGregor and his Random Dance Company are working towards a different relationship with electronic space. In The Trilogy Installation, he aims to take the audience, seated in the Greenwich Borough Hall or at home in front of their computers, into a virtual environment. He and his dancers can seem sci-fi mutants, morphed out of the ether.

The 70-minute performance combines sections of three works made between 1997 and 2000. McGregor's choreography and use of technology have grown more sophisticated over the years, so that the computer animations no longer mask a lack of structure in the dances. At first, noisy, high-adrenaline action pummels the senses into submission; then overlapping images of worker-ant clones propose a novel kind of group dynamics.

Finally, pure dance dominates. Aeon, the last of the trilogy, has no need of the light show that now accompanies it. Timo Arnall's graphic creation, a whirling, pulsing jellyfish, is even more amazing than Biped 's virtual dancers. But McGregor's real discovery is that he can choreograph for bodies not his own - and that other people, rather than digital programmes, can offer him new possibilities.

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