Paris Flocks to a Cunningham Revival: Works That Remain Fresh
<First published online in the New York Times on December 11, 2007>
PARIS, Dec. 10. Among the American cultural phenomena that the French have taken to their collective heart (le jazz hot, le film noir, etc.), surely nothing is more surprising than the success of the choreographer Merce Cunningham over several decades. His company visits Paris more often than any other city in the world, gives more performances here than anywhere else and tours extensively around the French provinces. In his home city, New York, empty seats are not unusual; in London it is only occasionally impossible to obtain a ticket for a Cunningham performance.
But his regular seasons in Paris - usually at the Théâtre de la Ville, but also several times at the Opéra, or in the courtyard of the Palais Royal - are usually sold out long before opening night. So on a wet Sunday afternoon in Paris, it wasn’t surprising to find people hovering outside the theater in hope of tickets more than an hour before the matinee that concluded the company’s engagement there, from Tuesday to Sunday; nor was it a surprise to find the audience breaking into a brisk unison handclap after the program’s last work. Quite right, too: American dance currently has no finer or more constantly rewarding export.
The Paris triple bill, to be repeated on Wednesday in Reims, consisted of “CRWDSPCR” (from 1993, pronounced “Crowdspacer”), “Crises” (1960) and “eyeSpace” (2006).
The current revival of “CRWDSPCR” is the first this millennium. When it was new, this dance appeared to be among Mr. Cunningham’s most radical works. He was then in the first flush of using a computer as a dance compositional device, and “CRWDSPCR” seemed to epitomize the new phrasing and dynamics (often staccato), and especially the new coordination of arms, torso and lower body that the computer had helped him discover. Today, however, “CRWDSPCR” looks relaxed, fecund, full of striking poetic drama about individuals and subgroups within a multipart ensemble.
In the slow solo originally created for Patricia Lent and often danced by Banu Ogan in the mid-1990s, Emma Desjardins’s beautiful figure and stretched line appear marvelously serene.
I had forgotten the felicities of the duets she now dances with Brandon Collwes. At one point, while she is locked into one richly three-dimensional position, her raised hand serves to support him while he balances on one leg. A little later he supports her the same way. But the main atmosphere of “CRWDSPCR,” connecting to its title, comes from its sense of different people doing different activities simultaneously. At first others are often motionless while one couple or trio dances; in due course, however, more and more things happen at the same time. The work, like the accompanying music (“blues 99”) by John King, rises in a crescendo of complexity.
In Paris the company’s newest dancer, Silas Riener, made an incisive impression in the opening ensemble of “eyeSpace,” which had its premiere last year in New York. Details like Mr. Collwes’s jump toward the audience while turning his head first to his left, then to his right, looked wittier than ever. And Julie Cunningham and Daniel Squire danced its concluding duet, which circuits the stage in high ballroom style, with great spontaneity and panache. Still, this is not a dance to be endlessly rewatched.
Unlike the current revival of “Crises.” When I compare this with other extant dance classics also created in 1960, like George Balanchine’s “Liebeslieder Waltzer,” Frederick Ashton’s “Fille Mal Gardée” or Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations,” I find “Crises” - which shows one man and four women in various combinations - much the most present-tense and modern. It still seems strange and ambiguous today, but unmistakably charged with intense personal drama from its opening duet on. Rashaun Mitchell dominates proceedings. His magnetic focus on his colleagues, the dangerous force with which he slaps hands on the floor or churns his torso while balancing on one leg, the slyness with which he makes one insidious entrance on all fours but facing upward; these are theatrical marvels. As the curtain rises, Holley Farmer is the one whose torso is churning, just as powerfully. In the same way Jennifer Goggans, in a later duet, writhes in Mr. Mitchell’s arms, these women seem possessed, inscrutable, indomitable.
The members of today’s “Crises” were all born after Mr. Cunningham’s own last performance of it, yet it looks astoundingly fresh. At each performance its surprising uses of stage space and self-contradictory upper-lower body-language become more absorbing. Even when drawing solely from the ballet vocabulary, Mr. Cunningham invented, as he still does, amazing neologisms. For example Ms. Farmer starts her second duet with Mr. Mitchell with one leg extended high to one side while keeping her torso plunged low and forward. Who in the world but Mr. Cunningham would have come up with such an image? You watch with your heart in your mouth.
@New York Times, 2007