Design Meets Dance, and Rules Are Broken
<First published online in the New York Times on June 17, 2007>
“SUPPOSE your daughter is getting married, and her wedding dress won’t be ready until the morning of the wedding, but it’s by Dior,” the composer Morton Feldman said to a friend in 1958. He was explaining how Merce Cunningham could be choreographing “Summerspace” in one part of the country while Robert Rauschenberg was designing it in another and he, Feldman, was composing the music in a third. By that time this wait-till-the-wedding compositional formula for Cunningham dance theater had already been established. According to its rules the choreography, design and music are created separately and may be brought together as late as opening night, with the artists knowing little if anything about one another’s plans save the dimensions of the stage, the number and physical details of the dancers, and the work’s duration in time.
The bridal dress for Cunningham dance theater has not invariably been of Dior quality (there have been a few horrors in recent years), the wedding music has sometimes been cacophonous, and a few Cunningham divorces have been all to the good. (Dances from individual Cunningham works often turn up out of their original context in the Events his company presents.) But “Summerspace” was one of the early masterpieces of this radical new genre. Over the decades many more have followed. The point is independence: Composers and designers have been given freedom to create along their own lines, rather than in servile attachment to the particular dance needs of the choreography.
Often it has proved a theater of marvels. A new exhibition, opening on Tuesday at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, illustrates the genre’s innovations. Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous “Summerspace” décor will be on display. Its pointillist backdrop and costumes, evoking both Monet and Seurat, made the dancers look like fauna in a landscape and made the stage seem a spreading subsection of a larger unity that continued out of sight.
Two films of “Summerspace” will also be on show, playing on a continuous loop: a black-and-white one of the original cast and a color one from 2002. Likewise some of Mr. Rauschenberg’s most famously zany costumes: the women’s parachute dresses and Mr. Cunningham’s four-arm sweater from “Antic Meet.” (Mr. Cunningham had to change arms while dancing, just as in Jasper Johns’s Marcel Duchamp-inspired designs for the 1968 “Walkaround Time” he had to change tights onstage while continuing a constantly rhythmic tread of the legs. At a 1997 benefit for Mr. Cunningham at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the “Walkaround Time” solo was performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov.)
In some cases Mr. Cunningham knew what he wanted in advance. He had seen Andy Warhol’s famous helium-inflated silver pillows at an exhibition and proposed using them as the décor for his next dance. The snag arose when he asked Warhol if he had ideas for costumes. Warhol suggested nudity. (Mr. Cunningham might have shared ideas behind the choreography, which arose in response to reading the anthropologist Clive Turnbull’s book “The Forest People,” about African Pygmies who wore little if anything.)
But the trouble with nudity in dance, of course, is that not all parts of the body stop at the same time. So Mr. Cunningham’s artistic adviser at the time, no less an artist than Mr. Johns, put the dancers in flesh-colored woolen tights and then, immediately before the opening, carefully ripped each costume to reveal small areas of bare skin. The dance was called “RainForest” (1968); the composer David Tudor planned its score so as sometimes to sound like raindrops falling on giant leaves, as in the jungle. Like “Summerspace” it has continued to be performed by the Cunningham company into this millennium. Those Warhol silver pillows will be on display in the exhibition.
Mr. Cunningham has always loved the Einstein dictum “There are no fixed points in space.” (He gave the name “Points in Space” to a 1987 work planned for television, in which the cameras roamed around the dance. To William Anastasi, who was commissioned to paint a vast cyclorama for the work, Mr. Cunningham simply said, “Think of weather.”) Michelle Potter, director of the Public Library’s dance collection, has kept the Einstein quotation in mind when planning this show. Visitors have a choice of both entrances and routes, and viewers on a mezzanine floor of the library will have a different window view that will show the Rauschenberg “Summerspace” décor” by way of the Warhol pillows.
One doorway will bring visitors into immediate encounter with one of the huge papier-mâché canopies that were Charles Lane’s décor for Mr. Cunningham’s “Way Station” (2001). I remember how the curtain rose on this work to reveal Jonah Bokaer standing motionless beneath one of these canopies like a doll, with an almost terrifying fixity of purpose; now visitors will be able to roam under and around it. To recall other décors there will also be maquettes of designs by artists like Mark Lancaster and Marsha Skinner, featuring some of the most sensuous arrays of colors ever seen on any dance stage.
Music will be part of the show, not least many of the extraordinary scores by John Cage. One of them, “Music for Piano 4-19,” bears a detailed cover note from Cage, “To Robert,” giving Mr. Rauschenberg some advance clue to the time structure of the work. Cage’s score for “Story” (1963) employs a voice chanting Gertrude Stein’s repetition “Once upon a time once upon a time once upon a time. ” (Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Story” set used a pile of garments that dancers donned as the work proceeded. At one performance Barbara Dilley Lloyd first put on all the clothes herself, then removed everything, her basic tights included.) There will be concerts of Cage’s prepared-piano music. (First devised when Mr. Cunningham was still a student at the Cornish School in Seattle in 1938 and 1939, this use of the more percussive possibilities of a piano was still shocking some observers when Cage accompanied the Cunningham company’s world tour in 1964. Yet by the 1970s international ballet companies were using other works choreographed to Cage prepared-piano music, like Hans van Manen’s “Twilight.”)
You could make a seriously impressive pure-art show just from the posters designed for Cunningham seasons over the decades: a famous Jasper Johns target poster; a darkly primitivist one by Morris Graves; a brilliant array of concentric semicircles in primary colors by Frank Stella for a 1968 Latin American tour; a vivid abstraction by Joan Miró for a Spanish tour; a whole series by Mr. Rauschenberg; and many more. Miró never designed a dance for Mr. Cunningham, but Graves and Stella were among those who did. Graves, indeed, had been a friend of Cage and Mr. Cunningham since the Seattle days. Working with them decades later, he made unforgettable décor for their 1977 “Inlets,” in which all three were poetically reimagining the Puget Sound zones they had known together; the huge disc that slowly passed across the back like a nearby moon can never be forgotten, nor the eclipse effect in the lighting. (Cage’s score for “Inlets,” with its directions for conch shells filled with water, will also be on display.)
But music and design do not make theater without stage action in their midst. And this would scarcely be a Cunningham exhibition were there no evidence of the dance. There will be a range of photographs and, as noted with “Summerspace,” films. But there will be further dance details too, like a whole plan of individual finger positions Mr. Cunningham devised for the dancer Valda Setterfield in “Second Hand” (1970). (It was she, by the way, who knitted him that four-arm sweater.)
I have been watching — and loving — Cunningham choreography for 28 years without knowing that this artist could take so much trouble over finger positions. But then, following Cunningham dance theater is, for any onlooker, a constant process of mystery and enlightenment: an education for the senses and for the mind that connects them.
@New York Times, 2007