One Stage for Each Eye, and Plenty for the Ears Too
<First published online in the New York Times on October 7, 2007>
BEACON, N.Y., Sept. 29 — Paul Valéry wrote in “L’Âme et la Danse” (1921) that the essence of dance lay in metamorphosis, that what dance shows is the constant change of one physical image into another. His point works for all dance, but to no choreographer can it apply more fully than Merce Cunningham. Change is the continual condition of his dance theater, and not just of one image, shape or rhythm into another.
In his Events this weekend at Dia:Beacon here, the Cunningham dancers performed on two square, raised stages connected at one corner. In two brief episodes Saturday the split-focus spectacle was of simultaneous solos, one on each stage, and if you tried to keep an eye on both, the interest was to see how similar or different they were. When Rashaun Mitchell and Daniel Madoff (opposite in looks), on separate stages, performed briskly step-laden and multidirectional new solos from Mr. Cunningham’s forthcoming “XOVER” (which has its premiere on Friday at Dartmouth College), the fun lay in how nearly identical their material was, although there were fractional differences in timing and drastic differences in focus. When Holley Farmer, an intense redhead, danced on one stage and Andrea Weber, a twinkling blonde, on the other, their solos were altogether unalike, but a harmony — like left and right hands of the same piano part — developed nonetheless.
Yet Mr. Cunningham, like a filmmaker cutting to a new scene, promptly replaced soloists with duets or ensembles, again and again. You singled out Mr. Mitchell as a star because of the lyrical fluency with which he tackled the off-balance challenges of one dance, only to notice him in the back row of a staccato unison group later. Nothing was constant but change. The coolly alert Koji Mizuta lowered Ms. Farmer into a diagonal line, her face and chest addressing the floor for a long while. This looked dramatically suspenseful, and you wondered what would happen next, but it wasn’t anything you could have predicted. He raised her back to standing, ran across to the other stage and joined a completely different dance.
In 1999 Alan Ayckbourn wrote a pair of plays, “House” and “Garden,” to be performed simultaneously in adjacent theaters, with the same characters in the same day adding up to quite different plays and the actors rushing from their exits in one theater to their entrances in another. Imagine the plotless dance equivalent and you have an idea of these Dia:Beacon Events. True, audience members could position themselves to watch both stages at the same time, but the left-right/foreground-background contrast was such that nobody could concentrate on both consistently.
BEACON, N.Y., Sept. 29 — Paul Valéry wrote in “L’Âme et la Danse” (1921) that the essence of dance lay in metamorphosis, that what dance shows is the constant change of one physical image into another. His point works for all dance, but to no choreographer can it apply more fully than Merce Cunningham. Change is the continual condition of his dance theater, and not just of one image, shape or rhythm into another.
In his Events this weekend at Dia:Beacon here, the Cunningham dancers performed on two square, raised stages connected at one corner. In two brief episodes Saturday the split-focus spectacle was of simultaneous solos, one on each stage, and if you tried to keep an eye on both, the interest was to see how similar or different they were. When Rashaun Mitchell and Daniel Madoff (opposite in looks), on separate stages, performed briskly step-laden and multidirectional new solos from Mr. Cunningham’s forthcoming “XOVER” (which has its premiere on Friday at Dartmouth College), the fun lay in how nearly identical their material was, although there were fractional differences in timing and drastic differences in focus. When Holley Farmer, an intense redhead, danced on one stage and Andrea Weber, a twinkling blonde, on the other, their solos were altogether unalike, but a harmony — like left and right hands of the same piano part — developed nonetheless.
Yet Mr. Cunningham, like a filmmaker cutting to a new scene, promptly replaced soloists with duets or ensembles, again and again. You singled out Mr. Mitchell as a star because of the lyrical fluency with which he tackled the off-balance challenges of one dance, only to notice him in the back row of a staccato unison group later. Nothing was constant but change. The coolly alert Koji Mizuta lowered Ms. Farmer into a diagonal line, her face and chest addressing the floor for a long while. This looked dramatically suspenseful, and you wondered what would happen next, but it wasn’t anything you could have predicted. He raised her back to standing, ran across to the other stage and joined a completely different dance.
In 1999 Alan Ayckbourn wrote a pair of plays, “House” and “Garden,” to be performed simultaneously in adjacent theaters, with the same characters in the same day adding up to quite different plays and the actors rushing from their exits in one theater to their entrances in another. Imagine the plotless dance equivalent and you have an idea of these Dia:Beacon Events. True, audience members could position themselves to watch both stages at the same time, but the left-right/foreground-background contrast was such that nobody could concentrate on both consistently.
@New York Times, 2007