L'amour est un oiseau rebelle : Carmen in Trafalgar Square

You know the traffic's bad when your bus driver advises you to get off and walk to the next stop. I blame the approximately four billion black cabs squatting in the road between Cannon Street and City Thameslink like fat rich old men in a public toilet cubicle. And so I missed the introductory sing-a-long of the Toreador song with self-described "animateur, presenter and populariser of choral singing" Gareth Malone. And I missed the rousing om-pom-pom overture with its crashing cymbals and its diddly-diddly-dee violins. But I did catch at least the vast majority of the 'summer screen' presentation of Georges Bizet's Carmen, broadcast live to Trafalgar Square from the Royal Opera House yesterday evening, even as it struggled to compete for the attention of my ears with the hubbub of post-rush hour congestion, the bells of St Martin in the Fields, the walkie-talkies of various event wardens, and the odd passing emergency services vehicle. No doubt it would have met with the approval of Christian Wolff, who liked to perform his piano pieces in his New York apartment with the windows open to the downtown traffic.

For my taste, Christina Rice was a little too broad and brassy in the title role. This is all very well of course, but to go all out with the guttural blousiness is to miss the contradictory nature of the character, the sweetness which honeys Carmen's, ahem, earthy sensuality into something genuinely seductive. The first act Habanera in particular sounded a little bit Mrs Mills, lacking the supple, lightness of touch which had so appealed to Nietzsche. It was a joy, nonetheless, to see so many people, of all ages, several thousand in London alone, watching with the same "tender devotion" that Nietzsche still felt after attending twenty performances.

"They could've got a big screen," went one old chap, struggling to read the subtitles from the side of the square. "Well, it is quite big, if you get close to it," averred his partner. He had a point though, large though the screen may have been before it was airlifted from yr local picture palace, it couldn't help but feel a bit dwarfed by the surroundings out in the broad daylight. But as the curtain came up for the final act, so the sun went down and the city and (so it seemed) its noises receded magically behind its inky cloak, and all the street lamps of WC2 were as so many Chinese lanterns, floating on a wave of thick romantic harmony. It was all, in the end, quite bewitching.

Merce Cunningham on Film

"The use of camera has extended the sense of what dance can be ... The two media do not compete, each abides in its own territory."

In a way, a piece such as 'Changing Steps' (choreographed 1978, filmed 1989) is ideally suited to film, it has a proto-cinematic quality to it. The indeterminacy of the piece - its various solo and group dances can be performed in any order, separately or overlapping as space allows - suggests the process of editing, offering up all sorts of possibilities for montage and juxtaposition. In the filmed version (of which an extract is embedded above), dances cut and dissolve into each other, sometimes hanging suspended in superposition. In the fragment above, the great wooden frame, separating the foreground dance from the background, suggests a cinema screen. Similarly, in 'Beach Birds for Camera', a sequence of the dance takes place on a soundstage, before a vast blue screen, suggesting the future presence of some fantastical imagery that is yet to be filled in. The film of 'Changing Steps', as presented in Amsterdam-based Total Film's 2003 DVD, The Merce Cunningham Collection, presents a collage of film and video, the latter is often severely degraded, blurring the dancers' features, and giving the whole an eerie, spectral feel. At one point we dissolve from the flickering lines of TV static to ripples on a pond, almost perfectly matched (but not quite).

'Deli Commedia' (1985) is Cunningham's tribute to the physical comedies of the silent era. While Pat Richter's Carmen-quoting music evokes the piano accompanist in a pre-war picture palace, the dancers movements frequently evoke, not just Chaplin, but also the not-quite-silent films of Jacques Tati. It is a curious feature of Cunningham's work for camera that, despite the presence of a non-diegetic musical score, a sound recorder is employed to record the footfalls of the dancers. In his introduction to 'Deli Commedia', Cunningham says, "One of the first things I saw through the camera was that you saw things faster ... That is, you caught the image quicker ... You did not have to dwell on it as long ... " For Cunningham, as for Paul Virilio, the emergence and mastering of new technologies is a question of speed. It is through speed that the twentieth century's artworks relate to its wars.

'Beach Birds for Camera' (1993) presents the human as but a brief mediating force between two non-human technologies: the Lifeforms software Cunningham used to choreograph the dance and the camera for which the staged version (entitled simply 'Beach Birds') was later adapted. But long before he began engaging with cinema and software, Cunningham had set out, in the words of Dee Reynolds, "to discover new parameters of the ‘human’ ... These assaults were frequently seen by contemporaries as attacks on the ‘human’ itself." The notion of the expressive human subject has always been extremely fragile in his work from the very beginning. As Reynolds continues, "Many critical comments on Cunningham in fact focus on the ‘undecidability’ of movements involving interactions between the ‘human’ the ‘natural’, and the ‘automated’." Perhaps nowhere is this slippage more uncertain than in the (1999) work 'Biped', for which motion capture software is used to allow the movements of the dancers to animate computer graphic lines and shapes projected on a scrim between the stage and the audience. Watching videos of 'Biped' (a piece not designed for camera), the scrim appears scarcely noticeable and the graphic lines and figures seem to take on an astonishing 3D quality, not just leaping out at the audience, but also effectively conveying depth, and drawing the audience further in to the performance.