A dancer's life

In this video, you see an excerpt of a much longer dance-performance "Cédric Andrieux by Jérome Bel", an event I attended last night. During an hour and a half, the dancer himself, Andrieux, narrates and performs the history of his relationship to dance, including his years as a member of Merce Cunningham's company. He joined when Cunningham was already 80 years old, but was still pushing the boundaries of dance, as he had throughout his long life as a creator.

What this video shows are Andrieux's performance of two Cunningham solos he shared with us, one that he performed over 110 times (Biped), the other a role danced decades earlier by Cunningham himself.  What you don't see in this video is everything else the audience for the Bel-Andrieux piece learned about the dancer himself, how he came to dance with Cunningham, what the daily routine of Cunningham exercises was like, the intensely hard work of learning the choreography, how a rehearsal worked, what it felt like to perfom, the emotional ups and downs of relationships over the years.  Our experiencing of watching him perform pieces was transformed by the dancer's knowledge he had shared withus with us, and it was an amazing gift. 

Choreographer Jérome Bel explains the process of collaboration that created this particular piece, which is one of a series of such dancer-biographies he has created, in this fascinating  "Talk Dance" podcast from The Walker Art (27 minutes).
This excerpt from the piece he created with Véronique Doisneaux gives an idea of what we experienced with Cédric Andrieux.

And in this second excerpt, she dances a Cunningham piece as well as something from Giselle.