Merce Cunningham: Retrospect and Prospect

MERCE CUNNINGHAM Retrospect and Prospect David Vaughan REBUS (1975) JacK wiairctiei The inaugural performances of Merce Cunningham and Dance Company were given at Black Mountain College in 1953, twentyfive years ago. Cunningham is not, of course, given to celebrating such jubilees, but the programs of the two-week season of Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the City Center, September 26 to October 8, 1978, did provide a retrospective of his repertory over at least twenty years, going back as far as Summerspace (1958) and Rune (1959). The change in the company's title is small, but 3 nonetheless significant, reflecting Cunningham's own desire to stress the company's present ensemble nature; for some years now the dancers have been listed alphabetically, including Cunningham himself, rather than hierarchically as they were at one time, with Cunningham's name at the top and the others in order of seniority below. He does not wish any one dancer to appear to be more important than another, though he himself inevitably remains more equal than the others. This shift in emphasis is indicative of some important changes in the character not only of the company but of Cunningham's choreography itself-changes in the one naturally follow upon changes in the other. In many of his recent dances, Cunningham has been concerned with mass effects; he has used an increasing number of dancers, and made pieces in which longer passages of unison choreography occur, or in which individuals do not stand out even when everyone on stage is doing something different. One could trace this development at least as far back as such works as the third part of Second Hand, Landrover,and TV Rerun. It may be that Un Jourou deux, Cunningham's 1973 work for the ballet of the Paris Op6ra, which used a large cast, intensified his interest in working this way. In any case, several of the pieces that came after Un Jour ou deux have been of this nature: Sounddance, Rebus, Torse, the original Exercise Piece, Exchange. The portions of the earlier Scramble and Canfield that have been retained in the material used in Events have mostly been those that can be performed by a large number of dancers. At the Paris Op6ra Cunningham was more or less obliged to concentrate on mass effects because the dancers he worked with were necessarily novices in his technique and way of composing, even after several weeks of classes with him. This is manifestly not the case with his current company, but it is often stated that the dancers now available to Cunningham no longer include suGh strong personalities as Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Remy Charlip (in his original company) or Valda Setterfield, Susana Hayman-Chaffey, Meg Harper, Gus Solomons Jr., Douglas Dunn, and others who have come and gone in the last ten or fifteen years-that the young dancers tend to seem "anonymous" on stage, are primarily involved with technique, and fail to project any character as individuals. To the contrary, I believe that the company Cunningham has now assembled is a nearly perfect instrument for his present concerns as a choreographer, the strongest group he has had for some time, and that this strength is not only in terms of technique but also of personality. Foremost among those present concerns, according to Cun4 ningham himself, are the possibilities and limitations of virtuoso movement, such matters of pure technique as swiftness of execution and the elimination of transitions between one movement or position and another. It may seem contradictory therefore to suggest that Cunningham does in fact want "character" from his individuals , in their way of moving primarily perhaps, but that is of course a function of individuality in personality itself. As Cunningham says, everyone in the world walks according to the same mechanism, but no two people walk alike, and that is what constitutes "expression." Like many great choreographers, Cunningham wants to get at that individuality, to draw it out, and draw on it, in the act of creating movement. In his present company of fourteen dancers in addition to himself, the largest ever, Cunningham has a group of people who work well together as an ensemble without...