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Protocol smasher
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Lincoln Center Festival 2002
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

NEW YORK — At 83, Merce Cunningham deserves to be reclining on his pedestal as an éminence grise of modern dance, a one-time iconoclast who’s devised so many routes away from the mainstream that his own position has slid toward the center. He should be more accessible, more comfortable for audiences now than he was 50 years ago, when there was no such thing as postmodern dance, contemporary dance, fusion ballet, or post-structuralist all-inclusive theatrical collage performance — all of which were inspired and encouraged by his work.

But no. The Cunningham Dance Company’s Lincoln Center Festival performances last week once again asked us to rethink what we go to dance performances for and what kind of satisfactions they promise us. The performances at the New York State Theater kicked off the company’s extended golden-anniversary year, during which it will travel to prestigious European festivals and major venues in the US (not including Boston) before finishing up at Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2003.

These stellar appearances are a far cry from the tiny Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village, where in 1953 only the most adventurous critics were on hand to witness Cunningham’s official debut as director of his own dance company. He’d already established a reputation as a terrific dancer in Martha Graham’s company and had begun his productive, nonconformist work life with John Cage. He’d started choreographing, done solo concerts, embarked on using chance methods to make up dances instead of pure intuition or musical signposts, and collected his first group of extraordinary dancers. You did not expect a Cunningham performance to be like other dance performances of the time, and the same is true today.

Okay, there are beautifully trained dancers who work in a theatrical space. There are separate entities called dances, with the curtain going up and down, and intermissions between them. But within these given situations, Cunningham always manages to surprise us. He probably doesn’t know how disconcerting it is to come upon these dancers and dances after looking at the Kirov Ballet, or even Mark Morris. Oh we’ve learned a lot, we sophisticates, but he’s way ahead of us.

The repertory for the State Theater performances — two programs done twice each — went back to 1956 but made no attempt to summarize Cunningham’s evolution. Besides the revival of Suite for Five (1956-’58), there was How To Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1965), two dances from the ’80s, Pictures and Fabrications, and a new work, Loose Time, that was shown every night. A new film by Cunningham and Charles Atlas, " Mélange, " also was screened at all the performances.

I don’t want to make it seem that Cunningham has a standard vocabulary — his work continues to evolve — but there is a look the dancers have. High on their legs, they seem always to be stepping, even when they’re still. It’s a functional kind of stepping: walking, running, leaping, even stumbling — precise but not ornamental like a ballet dancer’s steps. The sense of a need to travel anchors all the choreographic manipulation. We perceive changes in speed and direction, balance and elevation, as alterations in this locomotive drive. When the idea calls for the cessation of forward motion, as in the pronounced pauses of Pictures, what you notice is how precarious the poses are, as if something meant to be transitory had been arrested for an abnormal amount of time.

The dancers’ urgent need to travel is further complicated by a multi-directionality that Cunningham has cultivated so rigorously, they seem to have evolved into some higher species. In the new dance, there are sections where men and women throw their arms and legs violently into contrary directions, and where their torsos stretch out one way while their arms reach another and their heads focus somewhere else.

The dancers, intent on their individual movement patterns and destinations, appear unmindful of one another, except for their hypersensitive spatial awareness. They don’t have musical markers to tell them where they should be every microsecond. Even in sections of quasi-unison, they take their own timing, and that gives a slightly blurry but energized look to their groupings. They may do the same things facing in different directions, steering by inches out of each other’s way. And when they do come together, in duets, they seem to trust each other’s support as much as they trust themselves.

Cunningham dances are famous for the disconnection between the movement and the music. This was, I think, decreed long ago by John Cage, and Cunningham subscribed to it in his accommodating way. Now it looks normal — for him — though sometimes the music is thorny or noisy. The dancers go their own way, they aren’t immersed in agreeable stimuli. When the music itself is agreeable, you feel you’ve gotten a bonus, but I frequently tune out what I’m hearing, and in theory Cage wouldn’t have disapproved of that.

The five dances ranged chronologically from sparse to dense, though I don’t mean to imply that Cunningham consistently followed any such progression. The earliest, Suite for Five, not only had fewer dancers but revealed them spread out, in a series of solos and small, shifting groups. The score from Cage’s Music for Piano, a series of random notes for prepared piano, isolated them even further in an almost silent space.

Their movement was sometimes odd, even eccentric. Derry Swan stood in one place and did low circles and tilted openings with both arms. Later she balanced on one leg while shaking and lifting the other leg high above her waist. Jeannie Steele jittered around Daniel Roberts and Cheryl Therrien. Therrien caught the jitters and left. Cedric Andrieux carried Swan on one shoulder while kneeling and turning in a circle. A lot of the dance was slow, but it was full of changes, and nothing seemed to be repeated, however beautiful. I seem to remember them running in a circle toward the end, with foot beats in between steps, but they remained individuals, accidentally connected.

Revivals have always been a low priority for Cunningham, but Carolyn Brown has returned to the company to retrieve old repertory. She worked on Suite for Five and helped stage How To Pass, Kick, Fall and Run with Cunningham and Robert Swinston.

How To . . . is probably the only Cunningham dance with a verbal accompaniment, and the words almost always dominate the movement. In these performances, Cunningham and David Vaughan sat at a table beside the stage and read gnomelike anecdotes from Cage’s writings. Like the one about the mother Cage overheard at a show of Morris Graves’s all-black paintings telling her child, " Come, dear, mother doesn’t want you to see these things. "

You can’t always make out the stories because the readers often overlap each other. The stories are all supposed to take the same amount of time, and since they’re of different lengths, the readers might drag them out one word at a time, or hurry them up. In the struggle to follow this literal and funny narration, I often lose track of the games and fast rhythms the nine dancers are performing.

The two other revivals come from the period when Cunningham’s physical limitations were restricting his on-stage roles. In both Pictures (1984) and Fabrications (1987), he would walk into the middle of the dance and kind of roost in the background, the master teacher and mentor, sometimes sketching moves the dancers were to do, sometimes guiding or partnering them. Although his presence was tremendously powerful and moving, the revivals were so strong, I didn’t actually miss him. With 15 dancers each, they’re works of such inventiveness and even drama that I didn’t want them to end.

I felt I didn’t get the hang of Loose Time, even though I saw it twice. The large ensemble, dressed in metallic unitards, moves against a Terry Winters backdrop that looks like two outsize pieces of wire mesh crumpled and layered together, with a shaded pink light behind it. I couldn’t tell whether the object was projected, painted, or three-dimensional. Christian Wolff’s Cagean score featured an assortment of instruments (trombone, violin, harmonica, percussion) plus hisses, coughs, yelps, thumps, and plinks that might have originated from anywhere around us in the theater.

There was a lot of visual material projected on a proscenium-size screen in between the dances on these programs; this included the short film " Mélange, " a collage of four different dances; a two-part slide and film-clip résumé of the company’s history; and some filmed excerpts from Cunningham’s recently published book of drawings, Other Animals (Aperture). The quality of the projection was quite variable, and in the end I found it all less interesting than the live dancing.

At each performance, Cunningham came out for a bow, this grandfatherly figure with wispy white hair, leaning shakily on a cane, an unimaginably distant relative of the tall, stealthy creature of the wildlands who leapt and hunted through so many dances in the past. Yet something is the same. Probably it’s his calm. Neither excited nor unduly modest, he accepted the audience’s ovation with eyes sparkling, making sure that the dancers and musicians were included. He conserves his energy now, but the imagination and the eagerness to explore new possibilities are still working in high gear.

Issue Date: August 1 - 8, 2002
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