Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

Merce Cunningham 101

If you haven’t seen dances by Merce Cunningham, the best thing to keep in mind when you go to see them at City Center next week is a word Cunningham himself often uses. Flexibility. It applies to so many aspects of the dancing itself: his elastic use of space and time, of the feet and spine, of the shape and order of the dance phrases. The pieces we’ll see at City Center during the two-week season— among them, Summerspace (1958); the newly revived Rune (1959) and RainForest (1968); and Inlets (1978), not yet seen in New York—are fulllength repertory works, complete with the originally commissioned music, décor, costumes, and lighting. Usually in New York we see “Events”—reassembled fragments of dances. But in the context of Cunningham ’s work, even a repertory season is unconventional. Often the different components in an evening have appeared together for the first time on opening night—the music, for example, surprising the dancers as much as the audience. This is both for lack of time and for aesthetic purposes. For Cunningham, the different sensory 47 k Merce Cunningham 101 An Introductory Course : SoHo Weekly News, September 28, 1978 channels are autonomous, a situation that reflects the arbitrary correlation of sensory events in life. It also frees the dancing from slavishly following or contrasting with the music. Yet without corresponding directly in rhythm, tone, color, or shape, the expressive elements that coexist simultaneously in the dancing, music, and design do create an overall effect. Cunningham isn’t interested in making sure the audience “gets” a particular message from a dance, but rather in presenting a variety of experiences—aural, visual, kinetic—which the spectator is free to interpret or simply absorb. Cunningham’s collaborators have included composers John Cage, David Tudor, David Behrman, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young, and visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. So much of modern life requires that we live by our wits rather than by rules. Things rarely turn out as we’ve planned them, and to live at any given moment means to change plans at the last minute, to hear one thing and see another, to try to make some kind of personal order out of the bewildering chaos of sensory and mental experience. Cunningham ’s dances celebrate the states of uncertainty and simultaneity that characterize modern life and art. They decentralize space, telescope or stretch time, and allow for sudden unison activity, repetition, and rich variety and dispersal. They do away with the familiar comfort and predictability of dance movement that follows either a musical structure , a story, a psychological makeup, or the demands of a proscenium stage-frame. Yet by staying within a dance-technical system while relinquishing certain kinds of control, Cunningham reserves physical logic and continuity in the works. He may use chance methods like tossing coins or dice or picking cards to determine the order of movements in a phrase, sequence of phrases in a dance, places on stage to put the dancers, number of dancers to use in a section, or parts of the body to be activated. Chance subverts habits and allows for new combinations. It also undermines literal meanings attached to sequences of movements or combinations of body parts. But Cunningham’s program does not allow for improvisation by the dancers or spontaneous determination of phrases, since the speed and complexity of his movements would make certain situations physically dangerous. Once determined, the paths and positions of the dancers must be exact. Cunningham’s radical innovations in dance (beginning with the dances he made in the early 1940s, while still a dancer in Martha 48    Graham’s company) parallel those of John Cage, his long-time friend and associate, in music. Essentially, they make the following claims: 1) any movement can be material for dance; 2) any procedure can be a valid compositional method; 3) any part or parts of the body can be used (subject to nature’s limitations); 4) music, costume, décor, lighting, and dancing have their own separate logics and identities; 5) any dancer in the company might be a soloist; 6) any space might be danced in; and 7) dancing can be about anything, but is fundamentally and primarily about the human body and its movements, beginning with walking. For Cunningham, the basis of expression in human movement comes from the fact that everyone walks differently. You don’t need externally expressive features to create significance...