From the Sky to the Stage,
Birds Are an Artistic and Ecological Compass

Copélia Mainardi

From Firebird to Swan Lake, the figure of the bird runs through the history of classical ballet, and continues to inspire contemporary choreographers to this day. Some artists have even invited these graceful, feathered animals onto the stage. But, in recent years, dance pieces with birds have taken on a new dimension – one that wrestles with ecological fragility.

Costumed in black and white, the performers rustle, sway, flock, shake, and settle... The eleven dancers in Merce Cunningham’s 1991 Beach Birds were like seagulls on a shore. The visionary American choreographer regularly spent long periods contemplating wildlife, artistic research that he captured in his notebooks. He was particularly fascinated by birds: doesn’t dance aspire to their seeming weightlessness? How many dancers, across the ages and from all corners of the globe, have dreamed of escaping the laws of gravity in order to fly?

A pioneer in working with birds, French choreographer Luc Petton first wanted to reconnect with the emotions he felt as a child, watching migrating flocks return to his native Brittany in the spring. Back in 2004, he devised a one-of-a-kind creation, La confidence des oiseaux, inviting a whole host of species to the stage: crows, parakeets, jays, magpies, and starlings. For the artist, the relationship between bird and dancer is one of kinship. “Both are beings that travel, graceful and fragile,” he says. “Both depend on their movement. Both speak a language that knows no borders... And both come from a long history of migration.”

Over the last ten years or so, the aesthetic ambition of working with birds has been coupled with ecological considerations, given increasing media coverage of collapsing biodiversity. “The disappearance of many bird species has a particular impact on public opinion while the disappearance of insects, which is equally dramatic, does not have the same impact,” points out Joanne Clavel, a researcher in ecological humanities at France’s National Center for Scientific Research.

This issue of biodiversity loss has also found its way onto the stage, with contemporary dance artists choosing to address it in more or less concrete ways. In his 2019 work Extinction Room, Romanian choreographer Sergiu Matis created a sound installation made up of bird calls, collected by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, through which performers guide the audience. In Brazilian choreographer Marcelo Evelin’s 2022-piece Uirapuru, named after a rare and endangered bird which is the subject of an indigenous legend, six dancers perform minimalist choreography inspired by traditional rituals, inviting audiences into a metaphorical forest. And the Franco-Catalan contemporary circus company Baro d’Evel, known for having long worked with animals, has turned animals, like a raven named Gus, into an emblem of their artistic work.

But how do birds, and what they symbolise, continue to inspire such a diverse group of artists? When brother and sister Selma and Sofiane Ouissi discovered an abandoned cinema overrun by pigeons in the UAE city of Khorfakkan, they decided to work on a piece they called Bird. “For us, this place symbolized the fragility of our condition and the resilience of living creatures,” the Tunisian choreographers recount. Incorporating two live pigeons on stage, their dance explores “the tension between grounding and elevation, gravity and lightness, control and letting go,” which they say are all paths to “learning how to live together again.”

The birds’ fundamentally unpredictable movements become a source of choreographic inspiration, and the show turns into a “space for contemplation and dialogue,” raising awareness on the importance of the ephemeral, the search for balance, and a “more humble and poetic attitude to nature.” Other choreographers share a similar vision. Rachid Ouramdane, director of the Chaillot National Theatre for Dance in Paris, reproduces swarms of starlings in his pieces, while this March, British choreographer Jules Cunningham will premier CROW and Pigeons, two works about marginalized people inspired by how birds “find a way to keep moving and living within the hostile urban environment.”

Petton reminds us that, “With a bird, every movement can be awkward or damaging, which raises questions about our place as humans and our need to be careful with living things.” With his company Le Guetteur, the choreographer set out to create a special relationship between birds and performers – who cradle eggs to music, watch chicks hatch, and assist in feeding them. This protocol led to the creation of Petton’s 2018 Swan, for six female dancers and as many swans. “The fear of an accident was, of course, very much on our minds,” he admits. “But the connection we established from the start worked. It’s quite different from training other animals!” The dancers and musicians were given a great deal of freedom in their performance, and their scores were not set in stone. For Petton, “it is precisely in this unexpectedness that marvelous things can hatch.”

Today, despite growing attention to human connection with other living beings, Petton feels he can no longer continue this kind of work. “Advocates of an increasingly vocal animal rights movement have campaigned to ensure that artistic initiatives involving wild animals are no longer possible,” he says. One of his creations involved Manchurian cranes, a protected species.

For science researcher Clavel, the problem lies elsewhere. “This kind of production implies completely different timeframes, since the animals have to be raised and kept over a long period of time, which doesn’t fit the tight schedules of show business,” she analyzes. “The costs are enormous, and all the touring conditions have to be rethought,” she adds. “In the end, it’s incompatible with the ecological message the show aims to deliver.” For Petton, in any case, the birds he created with enabled him, through their intelligence and sensitivity, to relearn how to question the world, “to read what’s around [him], to become aware of space, time and energies,” and, therefore, to return to the founding principles of dance.

Copélia Mainardi is a journalist. She works with various media, including Le Monde diplomatique, Libération and France Culture, on reports, investigations and documentaries. After studying modern literature at university, she worked for France Culture, Arte’s 28 minutes program and Marianne’s culture department. She keeps a close eye on cultural news, particularly photography and performing arts, and writes about it for specialist publications.

CROW / Pigeons
Choreography: Jules Cunningham 
March 27 & 28 at Sadler’s Wells East, London
as part as Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

La confidence des oiseaux
Choreography: Luc Petton
Watch online on Numéridanse

Nature studies
Choreography: Merce Cunningham
March 12 & 14 at Maison de la Danse, Lyon

Merce Cunningham Forever
Choreography: Merce Cunningham
March 19 & 20 at Sadler’s Wells Theater, London
as part as Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels

Selma & Sofiane Ouissi
L’Art Rue
Learn more