Dance is one part of the natural world: Lyon Opera Ballet in NYC

New York City Center, New York, NY.
February 21, 2026.

Lyon Opera Ballet returns to New York City Center as the opening performance of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, a several week event with companies dancing all over NYC. Lyon Opera Ballet performed two works: BIPED by Merce Cunningham, and Mycelium by Christos Papadopoulos.

BIPED, created in 1999, utilizes digital projection on a scrim in front of the dancers, of both moving, rendering human form in movement, as well as abstracts shapes and objects. Certain projections were created using motion capture of actual dancers. Watching the piece in 2026 made me nostalgic for the early days of the internet, as the projections reminded me of those early web pages – although this was more carefully constructed. Cunningham was a fan of integrating technology into his dances, and had been doing so in some form since the late 1980s. For BIPED, he utilized the software he helped create, DanceForms, to aid creating the choreography. Despite all the technology, I still enjoyed the live dancing the most. Watching the piece felt like an education in dance history, while being a relevant conversation about how much value technology adds to our lives and our art.

In a complete change of tone, the second work of the night was Mycelium. Mycelium is the structure of a fungus, threadlike in its display, something that continually expands and reaches for new forms. Mycelium, the dance, behaves in the same way. All dancers are clad in simple black costumes and move as a group, flowing together with teeny tiny steps. The group resembles a flock of birds, separate from each other, but united as a whole body – moving through the sky (birds), or across the stage (dancers). Watching this creation was meditative and lovely. It epitomized the idea of individuals working together to serve the beauty and stability of the whole group. It was a mesmerizing end to the evening. While not filled with technical feats of dance, the commitment of the group to each other and to gentle task at hand served as a reminder that dance is one part of the natural world, if we can see it as so.

By Emily Sarkissian of Dance Informa.

The post Dance is one part of the natural world: Lyon Opera Ballet in NYC appeared first on Dance Informa Magazine.