In an essay on the choreographer Merce Cunningham, published in AIR MAIL back in 2019, the scholar Roger Copeland wrote that Merce Cunningham’s Biped “belongs in a celestial category all its own. I’ve come to regard it as Cunningham’s last masterwork and, given its premiere in 1999, the last great work of modern dance created in the 20th century.” Biped was choreographed on a computer, Copeland tells us, and “the living bodies of the dancers are often juxtaposed with ghostly, ‘motion captured’ images of their virtual selves.” Why a computer? Because upright “bipedal” posture—a verticality important to Cunningham—had become difficult to maintain due to his arthritis. In short, human evolution, advanced technology, and mortality are all folded into this one amazing dance. The Lyon Opera Ballet, always a company that has pushed boundaries, brings Biped to City Center, along with the work Mycelium, made by the rising choreographer Christos Papadopoulos. The dance is named for the networks of fungi that make life on Earth possible. Everything connects, this program seems to say. —Laura Jacobs