Merce Cunningham Legacy

I attended three consecutive evenings of Merce Cunningham: The Legacy Tour at BAM last week, the final performances by the company.

The choreographer’s six seminal works, among many, were performed -- three works before 1990 (RainForest 1968, Second Hand 1970, and Roaratorio 1983) and three later works (Pond Way 1998, Biped 1999, and Split Sides 2003). I saw another Legacy performance earlier this year in March at Joyce Theater; this included Antic Meet 1958, Quartet 1982, and CRWDSPCR 1993. Then, in July, at Merce Fair held at Lincoln Center, I saw Squaregame 1976 and Duets 1980. I have been to many Merce events, too, before his death on 26 July 2009 at 90.

Three days of immersion in Cunningham’s choreography brought me some (to me) new and more clarifying observations.

First, his dancers in his dances, in particular in his later works, are noteworthy in avoiding facial expressions and histrionic or even mimetic gesticulations. Their movements are therefore emphatically graphic, created as geometric configurations; his dances are totally non-mimetic and strictly abstract in this sense.

Secondly, in contrast to the works of many other choreographers, Cunningham’s dances are geometrically fully three-dimensional in conception. Dancers, of course, occupy a three-dimensional space and they do move sideways as well as in depth and in diagonal directions. But there is more often in other choreographers works a feel for the audience on one side -- outside the proscenium arch or the fourth wall. Cunningham makes us learn to see his dance group configurations in a fully abstract space without any walls. It is little wonder that he choreographed some of his dances in an open outdoor space. On the other hand, he is sparse in the use of vertical movements -- jumps and leaps.

Thirdly, Cunningham’s dancers, even in leotards or minimal covering, do not exhibit their bodies in their sensuality. Human bodies as bodies do not seem to concern him; he views bodies as composite lines. This makes sense in the light of the process of choreographing his Biped, of which, I believe, it was said that he first choreographed the movements of the legs dissociated from the torso, then the arms by themselves, and finally the torso -- all using the diagrammatic stick figures on the computer. This kind of anatomical disjunction counters the natural counterposition that is the basis of classical contrapposto (as seen in classical sculpture) in which the lines of hips, legs, shoulders, and arms are placed for balance as nature demands. When we lower the left shoulder, the right shoulder rises naturally, and the head counters it in the opposite direction. Cunnigham mechanizes the human figure but also, by forcing it, makes it dynamically charged.

Thirdly, I saw a fundamental source of excitement in Cunningham’s choreography in what I characterize as the seeming repetitiveness which harbors infinite variety which on close and repeated viewing effervesces out of the sameness. In this regard, it occurred to me that those who find Cunningham’s dances boring are most likely those who find Philip Glass’s music repetitive and boring. The works of both these artists reassembles fragmented units into a complex web. In Cunningham’s dances, the dancers often form small groups and perform moves that are unrelated to those of other groups. He explains, as does John Cage, his longtime companion and collaborator, that we experience our natural everyday environment as an assemblage of many unrelated events occurring simultaneously. Viewed this way, most curiously, Cunningham’s dances are so abstract and yet so fundamentally natural.

An elemental piece of this aesthetics is also what I find intensely appealing in Francis Alÿs’s Sheep and the sets of ceramic cups by Emund DeWaal (of The Hare with Amber Eyes).