By Twos: From Privacy to Fusion in a Cunningham Duet

<First published online in the New York Times on October 9, 2007>

HANOVER, N.H., Oct. 7 — They have their exits and their entrances, and in between, the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company dance. Hence, surely, the name of Mr. Cunningham’s latest marvel: “Xover” (pronounced “Crossover”), whose world premiere was the climax of a weeklong residency at Dartmouth College here. The dancers cross the stage, usually in pairs, and though sometimes they stay more or less on the spot in prolonged quartets, a large part of the work’s witty spell lies in the paths they trace across the stage.

In a brightly Mozartean quartet, Jonah Bokaer and Marcie Munnerlyn, in one set of steps, move to and fro along the stage’s rear horizontal area, while Rashaun Mitchell and Jennifer Goggans, in another, pass back and forth along its midground. Mr. Mitchell’s entrance is the most exciting moment in the work: He hops in triplets, raising his other leg in a sculptural attitude, and then switches legs, his arms powerfully rising in arcs opposite the raised leg, and all the while stays close to the equally lively Ms. Goggans. You want to laugh at his chugging rhythm and to gasp at the beauty of those opening-up arm gestures.

Mr. Cunningham, who took curtain calls in his wheelchair, was acknowledged as a master of male-female duets while George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, two other all-time masters, were still alive. (The current revival of Mr. Cunningham’s 1960 “Crises” shows why.) And though he has often created several works in a row with no sustained duets at all, he has done several — “Crises,” “Duets,” “Trails,” “August Pace” — with three or more.

Most of “Xover” consists of quartets composed with sufficient ambiguity that they could be parsed as synchronous quadruple solos or double duets. But at its center, like a slow movement in music, is the longest duet that Mr. Cunningham has composed in perhaps 40 years: seven and a half minutes. Even so, as in “Duets” (1980), he twice counterpoints it by having another couple dance across the back of the stage in a style quite different, an effect that serves only to intensify your sense of the slow, suspended lunar beauty of this duet, its two dancers never parting as much as a yard and never pausing for more than a second.

Something that makes it yet more unusual is that Mr. Cunningham has double-cast it, with four of the company’s junior dancers: Julie Cunningham with Daniel Madoff, in two performances, and Emma Desjardins with Brandon Collwes in a third.

Dancers in ballroom couples often look over each other’s shoulders or away from each other, and so do these. Even in moments of intensely controlled partnering, their bodies and faces are sometimes focused so completely elsewhere that you feel all the changing thought processes of being a member of a couple. By turns they seem to withdraw from each other into privacy (the duet as twin soliloquies), to fuse together into a meeting of interdependent minds and to regard each other’s inscrutable independence. All of this happens seamlessly and, though studded by numerous images of unusual beauty, matter-of-factly. In this duet Mr. Cunningham takes his long fascination with dance’s multi-directionality to a newly eloquent peak.

Ms. Cunningham and Mr. Madoff, both dancers of striking stretch and control, led me to marvel at the punctuating moments of linear grace, as when she, in profile to the audience, takes a gleaming arabesque penchée facing him, her supporting leg bent in fondu, while he faces front and arches forward. Ms. Desjardins and Mr. Collwes, more luscious in physical tone if less immaculate and with more remarkable qualities of focus, led me into the duet’s quiet ambiguities, like the many fourth positions he holds on half-toe, facing away from her, holding her hand, as she in turn holds a new shape facing another way.

The duet ends with a surprisingly theatrical flourish, like Astaire and Rogers in “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”: Standing by the wings the man lifts the woman; she arches back in a gorgeously dramatic line with her head turned to the audience, and suddenly he carries her off.

None of that has anything to do with Robert Rauschenberg’s backdrop or the John Cage scores, but each is superbly theatrical. The backdrop, a combination of painting and silk-screen photography, connects isolated images (a bicycle, a fence, an industrial view) with beautiful color and details of light. Cage’s “Aria” is a dry assortment of half-sentences in at least three languages and sundry mid-conversational noises (coughs, laughs), uttered by Joan La Barbara with meticulous stylishness. It is played at the same time as his sparsely percussive “Fontana Mix.” Both music and décor, serving as compelling environments, heighten your attentiveness to random details.

The white of the costumes (white is also the backdrop’s basic color) makes an extreme contrast to the black void in which “Crises,” the program’s opener and another Cunningham-Rauschenberg work, occurs. This 1960 dance, as revived in 2006 by Carolyn Brown and Carol Teitelbaum, has its cool episodes, but at least two of its duets seemed to occur at white heat, the women and the one man wracked or driven like Dostoyevskyan characters.

Mr. Mitchell is nothing short of astounding in the role originally danced by Mr. Cunningham. He makes you follow parts of this like a psychodrama, though his final sliding entrance on two padding hands and one extended foot, loins upward, is devilish, reptilian and irresistible.

In between these two “eyeSpace” (2006) moves from a sustained quartet, via an assortment of trios, to a final duet for Ms. Cunningham and the always bold, bright Daniel Squire. There are many points of fascination here, as when a slow trio for women, stage right, is suddenly joined by a fast trio for men, stage left. And there are wonderful details, as Mr. Collwes, jumping forward with arms outstretched to the audience, turns his head to look at his left hand, then his right (recalling both Ashton and Bournonville choreography).

The brisk final duet is nothing like those in “Xover,” but it’s ballroomy: Ms. Cunningham and Mr. Squire give us a staccato, modernist version of the quickstep, gliding around the floor with novel twists and angles. My guess is that Mr. Cunningham has been having fun watching “Dancing With the Stars” on television and getting, as always, new ideas.

@New York Times, 2007