Being Alone Together in Cunningham’s World

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

BEACON, N.Y.. “Love consists in this,” the poet Rilke wrote in a famous passage, “that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” On Saturday and Sunday the choreographer Merce Cunningham’s two Events at Dia:Beacon began with multiple solitudes: all 14 of his dancers pacing around a huge L-shaped space (the audience sat on two outer sides of the L, facing a Sol LeWitt white sculpture on the inner side), all doing more or less the same steps but never at the same time and never making connections.

But the Events ended with the same 14 dancers pacing around the space (right around the LeWitt), now in pairs like ballroom couples. Men and women were locked in each other’s eyes - sometimes the women led - and, as they changed arm positions from their partners’ necks to their waists and back again, it was plain that they were, yes, protecting, touching, greeting each other.

This is not to say that these Events, or those couples, were depictions of love. Rilke’s line came to mind because, of living artists, only the otherwise dissimilar playwright Harold Pinter compares to Mr. Cunningham in his ability to show a male-female scene as two solitudes; to make us wonder whether this man and woman are addressing each other or are conducting twin soliloquies; to show us how even in moments of intimate contact one or both partners may also be eluding the other. Or to astonish us by showing us two people, who seem to have been entirely unaware of each other, suddenly coming together as coolly and undramatically as a long-term married couple.

Solitude, or soloism, is anyway the basic condition of Cunningham dance drama. The 14 dancers at the beginning might have been birds or insects on the same lawn or pedestrians on the same sidewalk: it felt that natural. Soon afterward the action thinned out so that we were watching five women - evenly placed around the L space - again in solos, simultaneous, unconnected and unrelated, each moving without entering her neighbor’s space. At all points you felt the quintet’s pattern and harmony; but the main point was each woman’s absolute concentration on what she was doing.

But when man and woman come together - Cunningham duets are almost always heterosexual, not because of any sexual dimension but surely because of the hetero aspect (“hetero,” remember, means “other,” and there never was a choreographer more interested in otherness) - drama multiplies. In one luxurious passage on Saturday and Sunday three different duets coincided.

In the left corner of the L one of the duets (from “Changing Steps,” 1975) starts like a film of a couple in bed. Daniel Madoff lies on his stomach with Holley Farmer sitting on his back, and each time she touches his face with her fingers, we see - but she does not - how his feet rise as if in happy response. The third time, he rolls over (as if in bed) so that she can lie beside him, whereupon they switch into a more formal dance.

In the right corner, another (from “Interscape,” 2000) shows Melissa Toogood and Brandon Collwes moving on a coolly heroic scale. She is often passive, being caught or lifted, but also monumental: here cruciform, there totemlike.

This duet contains some of Mr. Cunningham’s most stunning examples of the man supporting the woman without looking at her: the most intimate occurs when he, kneeling at her feet, cups the back of her neck in his upstretched palm, a gesture that proclaims tenderness even while he looks the other way. Man’s chivalry to woman - central to classical ballet - here receives a radical extension: he serves her even when holding her just off the floor, and it is she who, arching her upper spine back at several different moments, basks. At the end she sits on one of his shoulders, and he walks slowly backward, beating one foot against the other calf as he retreats.

Meanwhile, in the heart of the L, Jennifer Goggans and Koji Mizuta are wonderfully busy with steps. (Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?) They’re in the same space, doing more or less the same material, and their bright footwork is riveting. Yet both look ahead, facing the same way. Their teamwork might be a happy accident.

A later split-focus use of the stage shows the sextet from “Scramble” (1967) on the left, while the “Jacks” quartet from “Un Jour ou Deux” (1973) occurs on the right. Both are witty departures from any kind of conventional ensemble; while one after another of the “Scramble” dancers does a solo, the remaining five line up and change places while playing number games with their hands. As the “Un Jour ou Deux” woman (Julie Cunningham) does spectacular balances, the three men kneel at her feet, taking turns to play with invisible jacks. One of those waiting his turn to play occasionally lends her some support.

At the end of the “Scramble” sequence Andrea Weber is dancing alone at the center of the L, one leg extended to the side, when suddenly Rashaun Mitchell comes up from behind her, places a hand on the inside of her thigh, and propels her in hops sideways. His action is outrageously intimate and - prompting a happy change of tempo - witty.

The tremendous duet that these two superb dancers now do together (from “Squaregame,” 1976) is both funny and strange. In an unforgettable image, both stand precariously on half-toe, and their legs seem to curve as if in some slow and weird Charleston. (They turn those legs, already angled at the knee, both inward and outward. Then they gently tilt their pelvises to make the legs’ angles seem all the odder.)

At another point both dancers, he standing directly behind her, extend their right legs sideways. But only Mr. Cunningham would ask them to extend those legs in different ways and speeds: Mr. Mitchell’s is turned out (knee facing upward), Ms. Weber’s held parallel (knee facing ahead) and lifted more slowly. The textural difference of the step becomes an expression of their two different psyches at this point in their relationship.

A little later the duet suddenly accelerates and becomes spatially and physically expansive. Both dancers ecstatically fling their heads back and stretch one arm upward, apart but together, as part of a pulsating phrase. Does dance get better - more itself, more dancey - than this?

@New York Times, 2008