MerceDay 6: the choreographer and Erik Satie
MerceDay 6. Once Cunningham had mastered choreographing dances that were independent of music, there was only one composer he used for dances that responded to the music, Erik Satie (1866-1925), the offbeat French composer whose work mattered immensely to both John Cage and himself. Satie anticipated both absurdism and surrealism, among much else; he called one piano score “Trois Morceaux en forme de poire” as a reply to a critic who had complained that his May ix lacked form, regardless of its being composed not of three pieces (“Trois morceaux”) but seven.
Cunningham choreographed it in 1953, addressing its seven-part structure with the name “Septet”, regardless of casting it with not seven dancers but six. The work has survived in repertory: I have seen it with both Rambert Dance Company and New York Theatre Ballet, as well as with Cunningham’s own dancers. Its musicality is radical: it responds to much of the music, but ignores some of Satie’s loudest staccato chords - or lets them register independently on the listener; and it stages movement to the silences between the musical sections.
Cunningham had his own expressive agenda here. In a programme note that he added two years after the premiere, he said that its subject matter was Eros, which occurred at the intersection of joy and sorrow. Perhaps none of its dances is more remarkable than this intensely structural quartet, here danced (in 1963) by Cunningham with Carolyn Brown (top), Viola Farber (left, and (in the role originated by Marianne Preger) Barbara Dilley Lloyd. The dancers move slowly from one intensely three-dimensional sculptural position to another; the slowness feels like a powerful response to the harmonic shifts in Satie’s score rather than its right-hand rhythm. Later, the quartet becomes charged by a slow-motion freeze-frame quotation from the coda of Balanchine’s ballet “Apollo”. When Cunningham was asked about this, he replied that he was thinking of Krishna and the cow-maidens (the gopis whose lives with Krishna prompted so much of India’s greatest love poetry). I think we may assume that Cunningham was thinking of both “Apollo” and Krishna; Indian art mattered to him quite as much as Balanchine. He was also thinking of ideas about love and art, often at cross-purposes, in a now largely forgotten French novel, once acclaimed: Pierre Louys’s “Aphrodité”.
Friday 16 April