Behind the apparent randomness and dispassionate delivery of Cunningham’s work is a powerful organising mind that gives you the material for you to make your own associations. Meanwhile, Gavin Bryars’s score, also called Biped and composed under the usual Cunningham conditions – in which only the piece’s duration was specified, creates a gentle environment. Bryars himself is in the pit, extending big, slow washes of sound and overlapping them with melancholic string phrases and occasional rattles.The dance is varied and beautiful, but the trick with the accompanying technology is not to let the moving imagery become too distracting In this, unfortunately, the piece does not succeed. Moreover, capture motion is a laborious process and its terminology inflated, describing itself aggrandisingly as creating “virtual choreography” But is it worth it? Let’s not get over-excited. So far, it is no more than a new kind of stage design.The impression of hype was echoed by some of the other events from the opening of Dance Umbrella’s digital art week (we’ve yet to see Random Dance Company’s The Trilogy Installation). Thecla Schiphorst’s Bodymaps: Artifacts of Touch, at the ICA, requires you to stroke a table to activate a compendium of pictures, which is interesting for a short while in a relaxing, low-key, kind of way. Hand-Drawn Spaces (at the Barbican Pit) by Merce Cunningham, Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, shows motion capture’s Biped moving on three screens and was part of the preparation for Biped, but really suggests that real-life dancers are more fascinating than digital ones.Meanwhile the Cunningham Dance Company continues a few yards away with Biped, performed on a double-bill with either of two classic revivals, Summerspace and RainForest, of which more in a future review.To 14 Oct (020-7638 8891).

In the hushed chambers of the Swedish Academy the knives are out again. The jury that awards the world’s greatest literary prize is deadlocked, its members too busy settling old scores to concentrate on the solemn task at hand. In the hushed chambers of the Swedish Academy the knives are out again. The jury that awards the world’s greatest literary prize is deadlocked, its members too busy settling old scores to concentrate on the solemn task at hand.
When the clock strikes one in Stockholm today the academy’s secretary, Horace Engdahl, will emerge from the committee room and announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It has taken longer than usual but these are extraordinary times. Never before have the members had to labour under the hovering ghost of a laureate.Discloures by a renegade member have ignited a scandal in Stockholm’s café society, with shock waves reverberating on distant continents.

For what Lars Gyllensten, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, illustrates in his memoirs is the petty and vindictive milieu inhabited by the world’s supreme arbiters of literary taste.The most sensational allegation Mr Gyllensten makes in Recollections, Only Recollections is that a previous winner was hounded to death by Stockholm’s literary establishment. Harry Martinson, awarded the prize in 1974 “for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos”, committed hara-kiri with scissors at a Stockholm clinic, the author states.Martinson shared his prize with Eyvind Johnson. The British reader can be excused for not recalling their names Not many Swedes can either Many of their works are out of print in Swedish. But both belonged to the club of 18 that chooses by secret ballot the winner of the Nobel Prize.Mr Gyllensten, who joined the academy in 1967, voted for them. The Swedish press and Swedish writers thought it was an outrageous decision. The furore drove his friend Martinson to suicide, Mr Gyllensten alleges.

In his final revenge, published last month as the academy began discussions, Mr Gyllensten accuses Stockholm’s poisonous literary circles and the academy itself.Academy members are not supposed to discuss the conclave-like selection, yet Mr Gyllensten delves into them with gusto. He tells of his anger, for instance, at the way William Golding was chosen in 1983. Mr Gyllensten, then academy secretary, the leading post, opposed the British novelist but his colleagues sneaked in a vote while he was on sick leave.In 1987 Mr Gyllensten wanted the academy to condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The majority declined, prompting a walkout by Mr Gyllensten and two other members, who never returned.None of this would matter beyond the Stockholm suburbs but the schism at the academy and the endless rows continue to cast a shadow over the world’s most coveted literary prize.