Alternate Worlds Moving on Two Stages, Performing for One Audience
<First published online in the New York Times on January 14, 2008>
BEACON, N.Y.. Because dance occurs in both time and space, it operates upon us as a demonstration of physics. This aspect becomes arresting in the work of two choreographers alone: George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. Mr. Cunningham has often quoted Einstein’s dictum “There are no fixed points in space,” and since the 1980s some of the ensembles in his work have struck observers as riveting enactments of chaos theory.
To watch his company on Saturday afternoon in the first of two Cunningham Events last weekend at Dia:Beacon was to see a poetically compelling exposition of parallel-universe theory. Before at Dia:Beacon, Mr. Cunningham has staged events on two or more stages at the same time. In 2004, working on three stages at the Tate Modern in London, he employed a barrier that prevented audiences from seeing all three at once unless they looked up to the lofty mirrored ceiling in Turbine Hall (where the full action was visible, though very distant).
On Saturday at Dia:Beacon he placed his two stages adjacent but on either side of a square doorway. Wherever you were sitting, you could see only part, never all, of the stage on the opposite side. That door, leading from one world to a parallel stage, evoked the controlling image of “The Subtle Knife,” the second novel of Philip Pullman’s trilogy “His Dark Materials.” In it the young hero can cut his way - slicing a square aperture in the air - from this Oxford into different worlds, at least one of which contains an alternative Oxford.
As the event began, the stage farthest from me looked breathtakingly like a mirror of the one closer to me. One group of dancers was moving in slow, controlled adagio, stepping, arching and bending with precision, while another, dressed identically, was doing the same but facing the other way.
Then, more than a minute into the dance, the denizens of the through-the-looking-glass world started to move in other steps and in a different tempo, whereupon the dichotomy between these two now dissimilar stages became both frustrating and entrancing. Here the dancers were balancing, fixed, waiting; there they were leaping fast across the space, caught up in some rush of which we could see only a fraction. And, like characters in the Pullman novels, dancers moved from one world, or stage, to another and back again.
In a brief introductory speech the Cunningham company’s executive director, Trevor Carlson, had encouraged people to move around and watch the dance from different angles, but perhaps because most people grasped at once that no view would be complete, a majority stayed put. Cunningham Events are anthologies of excerpts from this choreographer’s oeuvre, so I waited until a dance came along that I could easily identify - the superb male-female duet from his “Interscape” (2000) - before I started to walk around and view it from other angles.
By that point, unfortunately, this event, only 40 minutes long, was all too near its end. While you could have rearranged these dances end to end so as to last hours, and while no material here was less than first-rate, the experience was simply too short. (Afterward I met people who had driven four and five hours to the event and were satisfied by what they had witnessed, but some people who had taken the 80-minute train ride from Grand Central Terminal in New York were less content.)
Almost all Cunningham Events used to last 80 to 90 minutes, which worked well simply because it can take more than 30 minutes to accustom one’s eyes to the features of Cunningham style. Mr. Carlson announced that in the following 18 months six more such events would be presented at Dia:Beacon. May they be of greater duration.
Within those 40 minutes, the fascinating frustrations of that other stage seldom left me thinking that the grass was greener on the other side; “my” stage gave me more than enough to watch. This included two of those many quintets for one woman and four men that Mr. Cunningham has composed over the years, each full of ingenuity that is Haydn-like in its structural wit.
In one a woman is enthrallingly lifted across the stage by three men in a slow arc while the fourth, jumping in front of her, closely but more fleetingly echoes the features of her line. This touch is remarkably like another Haydn-like choreographer, Frederick Ashton, but within a phrase or two this quintet changed shape into something that nobody but Mr. Cunningham could have conceived. The woman and one man arch back, like front- and back-seat passengers reclining powerfully, amid the carriagelike shape made by the other three men.
Apart from the innumerable such masterstrokes, all of which support the frequent contention that Mr. Cunningham is the greatest of living choreographers, the Beacon Event on Saturday was also a constant display of the stylistic particularities of Cunningham dancing. Except for a very few dances (none excerpted on Saturday) when Mr. Cunningham has put his dancers in heeled shoes, this company has always performed barefoot, and no other modern-dance style gives the dancers’ feet as much precise articulation, as much strength and as much finely textured beauty as ballet can offer.
Cunningham dancers are often as astounding in balancing on half-toe as a ballerina can be on point, and some of them have feet as lusciously arched as a ballerina’s. (Julie Cunningham’s were especially eye-catching on Saturday.) At this performance, however, I noticed in particular an opposite virtue: the smoothness and fullness of tone with which these dancers often, while holding one leg extended, lower the heel and bend the knee of the supporting leg. The main dance shape remains; the physical basis changes. It feels as if the orchestra has softly entered under a solo voice that is maintaining the same high note.
Most of Saturday’s audience lingered after the performance, when Mr. Cunningham, who will be 89 in April, gave an interview with Lynne Cooke, curator of the Dia Art Foundation. As so often, Mr. Cunningham sounded forward-looking; as so often, he justified his choices of compositional methodology, like tossing coins and dice, because “something new comes up you hadn’t thought of.”
But the way this Beacon Event had placed most of the audience close to the stage reminded him of nightclubs. “I played in some of those when I was an adolescent with people sitting close enough to blow smoke in your face while you were dancing in front of them,” he said. (I suspect he was recalling a 1934 West Coast tour he made at 15.) When you think how very far this master and avant-gardist has come since then, you can only marvel and laugh.
@New York Times, 2008