Beyond the Visible: The Legacies of Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch

I learned about Pina Bausch's death through an e-mail from a woman I hadn't heard from in years, an American filmmaker who had moved to Sweden to live in the home country of Ingmar Bergman, her greatest influence. It's a blow to the field, she empathized, adding that she mourned for months after Bergman died. Not much later, I was on tour with Yvonne Rainer in Brazil, where we learned via friends in New York that Merce Cunningham was on his deathbed. Days after we returned, Yvonne sent out an email, subject heading "Merce." The body of the message read simply, "died today."

Losing these two pioneers in one summer took its toll upon the global dance community on many levels. I am inclined to see the loss in human terms, in its impact on dancers and viewers. I feel most acutely for the former, and I feel the philosophical implications of the latter.

Last May, I attended one of the final performances of the Cunningham Company's two-year series of installations at DIA Beacon. Near the entry to the gallery, Merce Cunningham presided over the event from his wheelchair. Hunched slightly, his head dropping forward on his spine, he kept a calm, observant eye on his dancers. In 1998, in the interim between leaving New York City Ballet and joining White Oak Dance Project, I studied at the Cunningham Studio, including taking the Monday classes taught by Merce himself. I found myself trying to view the performance through his eyes.

Cunningham was not known as a "people person." In her brilliant memoir, Chance and Circumstance: Thirty Years with Cage and Cunningham, Carolyn Brown documents his cool reserve and infamous inability to communicate. Critics in turn emphasize the conceptual merits of his art: he pioneered chance processes, developed the choreographing computer program LifeForms, and exhibited a nearly inhuman level of technical virtuosity. While these accomplishments are undeniable, he possessed greater skill for seeing and cultivating the individual qualities of dancers than his usual praise reflects.

I am thinking of Andrea Weber's cool hips in the duet from Squaregame, which she performed with Rashaun Mitchell during the DIA performance. With her height and broad shoulders, Weber tends to dominate the stage simply by walking onto it. In one moment in the duet, she led a progression down the diagonal of the performance space with subtle movements of the knees and pelvis. Smaller-framed Mitchell followed behind. Because Weber led, what I saw from my perspective as they moved downstage were those voracious hips, gently scooping out space as if carving out a series of miniature banana split bowls. Supporting her prowess from the rear, Mitchell served merely as her wingman. Had their positions been reversed, the effect would have been different. The eroticism of this moment bordered on highly formalized pornography; we were so close to her, to him, to those hips. Cunningham could easily have cast Weber in enormous jumps, lunges, triplets that crossed the stage. Instead, he asked her to perform only a hip wiggle, and in doing so made that subtle movement not just visible, but all-consuming.

When I think of Bausch's attention to individual dancers, a larger-scale scenario comes to mind. In December 2008, I watched Pina Bausch's tribute to India, Bamboo Blues, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The section that stays with me is the series of lush solos that unfolded in seemingly unending layers. As one solo ended, a new dancer started; when that dancer finished, another began. Individual quirks came into relief—a shorter male dancer whipped around more vigorously than the statuesque brunette, who danced primarily with her upper body—while the solos maintained the flowing, effortless quality of the Bausch aesthetic. The relentless parade of individualism was hypnotic. Both celebrating and transcending her dancers' idiosyncrasies, the section amounted to a manifesto on the synergistic power of individual action. Nodding to the Indian culture that inspired Bamboo Blues, it was also a kinesthetic representation of veiling: we sensed deeper motivation underlying the movement, without knowing...