Walking to and Fro to Eye Dance, Sky and Sculpture

<First published online in the New York Times on July 8, 2008>

BEACON, N.Y.. To return to Merce Cunningham’s choreography, no matter how good or bad any other dance you may have been watching of late, is to have the palate cleansed. At first you just see movement, much of which is neither pretty nor obviously expressive, but it’s always substantial, complex, arresting.

The dancers seem driven as they set about fulfilling its rigorous demands, and so its challenges draw you in. Soon you start to feel how the dance features you’re watching add up to a style, even though the idioms before you keep changing. And as you sense a style, you recognize aspects of expression. Meanwhile, you’re being led to attend to basic dance elements with a concentration that makes you feel them as if for the first time.

On Saturday and Sunday the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed its latest series of site-specific Events here at Dia:Beacon. Starting last year, each series has been in a different gallery within the Dia:Beacon complex.

The three this weekend occurred in a room in which “Torqued Ellipses,” four giant Richard Serra metal sculptures (the kind you can walk in, through and around, like miniature citadels with variously tilting walls) are placed in a row, opening at either end to the outdoors. There were four musicians, one placed within each sculpture; the resonance this placed around their electronic music was terrific, making it sometimes like distant thunder, often like a giant hum. The dancers wore tights in a spectrum of yellow-bronze-rust colors that complemented the sculptures’ oxidized surfaces.

Each Event was about 40 minutes long, less than half the length at which I have loved Events in the past, but perhaps sufficient for a hot July afternoon without conventional seating for the audience. And Mr. Cunningham had arranged the dance in quantitative terms not of duration but of multiplicity. For these Events the dancing was arranged on three separate stages, one at one end of the four sculptures, one at the other, one (small) between the second and third. The dancers moved from one stage to another.

You were encouraged to walk around. If you did, you had the richest sense of the Serra sculptures and of the differences in light and perspective around each stage. It was tempting, however, to stay put by one or the other of the two main stages, because each was so full of choreography. That was how I watched Sunday’s 2 p.m. performance, and - even to me, a follower of Cunningham Events since 1979 - it was an extraordinary layering of things I knew of old, things of which I had no memory and things that revealed themselves in new ways.

At the 4:30 p.m. performance, though, I began by viewing the stage at the other end, with the dancing in the foreground and a Serra looming behind it like battlements. Later I moved to watch the dancing on the little stage in the middle of the gallery, where I saw Emma Desjardins dancing a solo (newly composed by Mr. Cunningham, I was told). Finally, I returned to check what was happening on one of the larger stages, but watched it now with a Serra beside me so that behind the dancers and audience I saw sky, trees, grass. A Metro-North train added its noise to the score.

At one point I was riveted by Daniel Squire’s dancing of a solo in which he balanced with a leg raised one way, kept shifting his torso, changed the position of his leg, kept shifting his torso, and so on. It was balance without stillness; or rather it was stillness and motion perfectly mixed. Suddenly he stepped out and off balance: the effect was disproportionately colossal.

At other points group dances became studies in scansion, the dancers crossing the stage in footwork that had meter now iambic, now anapestic, with phrase endings as suspenseful and momentous as with the greatest verse speakers. In one ensemble the group rhythm interconnected with its crisscrossing pattern: one line of four dancers moving one way kept meshing with, parting from, forming mirror formation with, a second line of two dancers. Mr. Cunningham’s choreography does not respond to music, but it’s easy on such occasions to see why it has often (by Mark Morris, among others) been called profoundly musical.

Any Cunningham Event is an anthology of dances Mr. Cunningham has made over the years. I believe I recognized in these material going back to “Scramble” (1967), “Signals” (1970) and “Fractions” (1977), through the past 17 or so years, in which he has composed dances with the help of a computer. To watch the changing-quartet ensemble from “Installations” (1996) or the new solo for Ms. Desjardins in such a context is to be shown the remarkable continuity of Mr. Cunningham’s work.

Though there are certain upper-body hallmarks that make it easy to identify some (only some) of the “computer” choreography, Mr. Cunningham in these later years has kept addressing - sometimes in entirely new ways - the same issues of complex coordination that always fascinated him when he was in his own dance prime. In 1997, when it seemed that Mr. Cunningham was driving his dancers in fiercely impersonal and abstract directions, Carolyn Brown (his chief co-dancer in the 1950s and ’60s) pointed out that she and her contemporaries had been likened to robots in their day too. Now the Desjardins solo, a wonderful study in slow-moving tranquillity and classical line, looks as if it might have been composed 40 years ago for Ms. Brown.

The virtues I have singled out so far in Mr. Cunningham’s work have all been classical virtues, and the classicism of his work has been widely discussed for many years. Often, though, it seems as if nobody is keener to be anticlassical than Mr. Cunningham, who has said, “It’s when movement starts to be awkward that it becomes interesting.” There’s a strong streak of violence in his work, and sometimes a dancer seems to be classical and anticlassical at the same time.

That’s what happens in the thunderous solo for Holley Farmer from “Loose Time” (2002), which was seen again in these Events. It’s a pure-dance series of staccato and marcato moves, each for a different body part, that take Ms. Farmer straight down the long diagonal of the stage, but as if she were impelled and wrenched by some expressionist force, even though one or another part of her body remains vertical, composed, constant.

I could cite another hundred examples from these two Sunday performances and add them up to another hundred conclusions. Reacquaintance with Mr. Cunningham’s work makes it only more boundless.

@New York Times, 2008