An Artist Turned Toward Complexity

<First published online in the New York Times on September 20, 2007>

This year Merce Cunningham and colleagues have presented a retrospective series of evenings about his choreography called “History Matters” at his studio at Westbeth in Greenwich Village. In April I reported on one that covered the 1940s and ’50s; I missed the June evening about the ’60s. On Tuesday night the subject was the ’70s. Excerpts from some works were shown on screen; others were danced by members of his company. The excerpts were discussed by the company’s archivist, David Vaughan; by Mr. Cunningham; and by two of his ’70s dancers, Valda Setterfield and Ellen Cornfield.

As with artists like Haydn, Goya, Picasso and Stravinsky, each phase of Mr. Cunningham’s work shows a restless need for reinvention: to move on, to change. In 1970 his company (starting a period when it was resident at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) still included his most famous dancer, Carolyn Brown, and another celebrated founder-member, Viola Farber, returned for guest appearances that year.

By 1980 his personnel had changed entirely, and the company included two male dancers, Robert Kovich and Chris Komar, who took its technical level to new peaks of complexity and speed that must remain arduous challenges for any dancer today. In the 1976 “Torse” Mr. Cunningham drove his dancers to master footwork and legwork of unprecedented difficulty. Ms. Cornfield, a strong dancer, said on Tuesday, “My calves were in contraction for about three years.” (Something similar occurred in the mid-’90s when Mr. Cunningham, working with Life Forms computer software, pushed his dancers to new extremes of coordinating their upper and lower bodies.)

Before 1970 Mr. Cunningham seldom allowed his dances to be filmed; by the end of the decade he was in the vanguard of dance filmmaking, choreographing or rearranging work to fit the film frame, and relishing the opportunities that the medium afforded. The 1977 videotape of “Fractions” remains among the virtuoso achievements of dance on camera: Most of the frame shows, in long shot, the main ensemble core of the dance. But on the right of the screen we see a block of four monitors, each showing a view so different that it is hard to believe they are all live accounts of what was happening in the studio.

“My mind always turns toward complexity,” Mr. Cunningham has often said, and on Tuesday he was ruefully amused by the difficulties he set for himself. After a screening of parts of “Blue Studio: Five Segments” (1975), a solo videotape he and Charles Atlas made, he recalled that his solos had been filmed in a television studio scarcely wider than the full stretch of his arms, and that the shoot had to be completed in two days before the studio would be demolished. The joke is that he and Mr. Atlas then superimposed different backgrounds on the image, so that Mr. Cunningham sometimes seems to be skating along an open road. The work belongs in the same category as those Fred Astaire solos that feature “magic” effects.

During the same decade the playwright Alan Ayckbourn became fascinated by issues of time and space. His 1973 trilogy “The Norman Conquests” showed the same characters over the same weekend having entirely different experiences in different parts of the same house and garden. Yet Mr. Ayckbourn’s intricate comedies seem simple compared with the different views seen in “Fractions.” An intimate close-up of a woman, her head thrown ardently back in her partner’s arms might be from a Bergman movie, while the next monitor shows a sculptural grouping and another features a lively traveling dance, all part of the same place and moment. Here is one of Mr. Cunningham’s ultimate views of relativity.

All of this might seem dry, if Mr. Cunningham did not always seek out what is dancerly, finding contrast while avoiding cliché. (Though not included in the excerpts seen on Tuesday, “Fractions” featured one of Mr. Cunningham’s greatest duets.)

Ms. Setterfield, surely the most eloquent of his former dancers, recalled how in “Signals” (a 1970 work performed in excerpt on Tuesday) Mr. Cunningham made places where big steps might be performed with unusual speed and where small steps might be given more time.

Tuesday’s program included a witty trio from “Changing Steps” (1973) that kept one man and two women close together as they danced briskly across the space. By contrast, a heroic trio from “Torse” (two men, one woman) showed innumerable uses of time and space, the dancers facing every which way at different points, sometimes all on one side or all on the other, sometimes partnering close, sometimes far apart and in different rhythms.

This trio, performed with fluent authority, made an outstanding impression on Tuesday. Since none of “Torse” has been danced live for 14 years, it would be good to see more of it onstage now.

For some of us the Cunningham studio has always felt like a movie set because we first encountered it in the film of “Locale” (1979), which begins with a single slow Steadicam shot rotating 360 degrees around the studio, taking in a series of rich duets and trios. So it was funny on Tuesday to see the start of “Locale,” in his stage arrangement, with the duets and trios making successive appearances in a more limited space. It’s a wonderful dance, marked by statuesque positions, hints of tangolike partnering and deep fourth positions that add to the choreography’s rich texture. When I saw this revived in 1995, I recognized it as an old friend, and I do so again now.

Although nobody remarked on this on Tuesday, it was in the 1970s that Mr. Cunningham started to be considered a classical artist: not because of his use of aspects of the classical ballet vocabulary, but because of the wit, the synthesis, the formal grace with which he showed that the subject matter of dance was dancing.

That remains true, though he has gone on restlessly extending his style, often making it apparently anti-classical, into the current millennium. It is like Cunningham and company not to make much of these one-off “History Matters” evenings; but their rarity only heightens their quality of revelation. More matters here than mere history.

@New York Times, 2007