Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (review)

From the outset, Roger Copeland contends that his book, Merce Cunningham, is not a conventional biography of the choreographer but rather more of "a cultural history of that moment when American art moved beyond the ethos of Abstract Expressionism" (11). Copeland describes his approach as "interpretive," as opposed to "descriptive" (19). The ostensible reason for not adopting a traditional dance criticism approach rests on the fact that Copeland wants his book to appeal to the "generalist reader" (21). At the same time, he does not offer a "close reading" of particular works and here, as in other aspects of the book, he is setting out his stall in relation to certain tendencies in recent dance criticism and scholarship. Copeland focuses on "an accumulation of precisely described moments" (21) from a variety of works over a 50-year period; from major early works based on chance operations designed to remove choreographic determination, to Cunningham's more recent technological interventions utilizing "life forms" and "motion capture." Copeland does not discuss Cunningham's personal life nor his sexual preferences, as he considers recent attempts to analyze how Cunningham and John Cage's long-term partnership impacted upon their respective work "woefully misguided" (19). Instead, Copeland begins from the position that for the most part, Cunningham's "life is his work" (257) and, in chapter 12, "Modernism, Postmodernism and Cunningham," he takes issue with the exponents of "identity politics" (artists and theorists) who would generally view Cunningham's and Cage's lack of direct engagement with the politics of difference as an escape from or a concealment of their homosexuality.

The scope and direction of Copeland's book are set out in his introduction. The 12 chapters that follow expand and explain Copeland's central thesis—how and why Merce Cunningham may be viewed as the modernizer of modern dance—by examining his work in relation to "composers and visual artists with whom he worked" (18). Thus, the author draws on a range of artistic practices and media to marshal his argument, and concludes that despite a number of correspondences between Cunningham's choreographic practices and the aesthetics of postmodernism, the artist's work is ultimately situated at the interface between postmodernism and modernism.

There are several key themes that run through the book, including the reconfiguring of the mind/body relation in dance. Copeland argues that the "ethos" that underpins Abstract Expressionism, which emphasizes the "full participation of the artist's body" (18), was not only to be found in fine art practices of the 1940s and 1950s, but also in the theatre, film, and dance of that period. For Copeland, the clearest example of this ethos in dance is in the work of Martha Graham. Her famous statement that "bodies never lie" underpins her belief in the "wisdom of the body" (12) and her concern to reveal through modern dance the universal, mythic forces that are lurking underneath the face of contemporary culture.

Copeland's study seeks to examine how Cunningham broke the mold of this ethos in dance by adopting a decidedly "un-Dionysian movement" that entailed imbuing modern dance with "the cool detached, impersonal sensibility" (12) that had also come to characterize the work of painters such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and directly challenged the fundamentals of the Abstract Expressionist movement. The repudiation of Abstract Expressionism in favor of an "aesthetics of indifference"—a phrase that was coined by Moira Roth to describe the work of Cunningham, Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns—forms the core of the book. The chapters (4, 5, and 8) where Copeland examines in some detail the synergies between Cunningham's approach to dance and that of the other three aforementioned groundbreaking artists are the highlights of the book. Here, he weaves a convincing story of "collaboration at a distance" among this group of likeminded artistic producers (270). As Copeland notes, this is in contrast to dance criticism where...