Even Together, Alone: An Ethos of Soloism and Independence
<First published online in the New York Times on May 19, 2009>
BEACON, N.Y.. “Go placidly amid the noise and haste.” The opening words of Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” have often come to mind while watching Merce Cunningham’s dances. The fact that some of the scores he uses are babels of conflicting sound has often made for good philosophy and great theater: the dancers proceed through the cacophony collected and unperturbed.
Last weekend (twice on Saturday, once on Sunday), however, as the musicians David Behrman, Robert Black, Shelley Burgon and Matana Roberts accompanied the Cunningham company’s final three Events of an almost two-year series at Dia:Beacon, the lines that came to mind were Caliban’s: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,/Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”
One of the best features of Cunningham music is its use of technological polyphony. Ms. Roberts began these Events with two-note phrases from her saxophone, but later (she herself did not move) the sound mix made her playing come from a speaker on the other side of the hall. Ms. Burgon’s harp recurrently made rippling patterns that, as amplified, recalled Caliban’s “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/Will hum about mine ears.”
These Events took place on three parallel unraised stages in the same gallery, lined with Imi Knoebel’s paintings. Dancers moved from one stage to another; the action on each was quite different (along the lines of Alan Ayckbourn’s “Norman Conquests” on Broadway, in which three plays show the same characters over the same weekend in different parts of the same house). The audience, sitting or standing, could watch on three sides of each stage.
“Go placidly.” The speed, precision and multi-directionality that are hallmarks of Cunningham dancers may not always seem the embodiment of placidity. But even at high velocity they retain some quality of repose. Who could miss this at these performances? A dancer would sometimes finish hurtling jumps, or accomplish hair-raising feats of balance, less than two yards from the nearest audience members.
The core of Cunningham choreography lies in the principle of soloism (dancing independently, even in duets or ensembles). Just now there is no dancer in the world I would rather watch in solos than Rashaun Mitchell, and in these Events he performed three great ones, one on each stage: from “Scramble” (1967), “Doubles” (1984) and “Changing Steps” (1975). No dancer delights more in rapid changes of focus or tempo; he exemplifies both animal intensity and cool grace.
Mr. Mitchell never loses a secret ingredient of play; he delivers a dance as if he were discovering it as he goes along, and discovering himself in the process. He exults in paradox (in “Doubles,” a circuit of low jumps nonetheless still seems to hover) and in contrast (later, in the same work, like the rider of his own bucking bronco, he lurches forward on one jump and then rears back on the next).
On all fours but facing up in his “Changing Steps” solo, he first makes a boxlike rectangular shape, and then re-forms to make an all-curves arch. He is a paragon doing things you never could, and yet the kinesthetic quality of his dancing is such that you feel that you’re moving with him as you watch.
Andrea Weber dances the terrifying balances of her “Way Station” solo (2001) with innocent delight. She holds a bent-leg attitude, then tilts her torso slowly sideways; or she squats on the balls of her feet, legs wide apart, and leans way forward. Or she stretches one leg sideways yawningly up to the ceiling, her torso tipping way over, and then, recovering her balance, keeps the toe of that still raised leg hovering just an inch off the floor. Has any more physically exposing solo ever been choreographed? Ms. Weber looks coolly rapturous in it.
Samuel Beckett once told an actor that “Waiting for Godot” was about “symbiosis.” You could say the same of any Cunningham duet. These Events featured many duets in which it was startling to see how often man and woman danced apart, doing different things at different speeds, seldom even referring to each other and making physical connections more rarely yet. When those connections occur, however, they are astonishing.
In certain duets from “Changing Steps,” “Points in Space” (1987), “Interscape” (2000) and “Way Station,” you see how the woman (Emma Desjardins, Jennifer Goggans, Melissa Toogood and Ms. Weber) literally falls out of a balance into the man’s hands or arms or onto his chest. You feel both her need for independence (she doesn’t fling herself eagerly) and her need for a man.
In “Changing Steps,” she falls forward and then pushes herself away from him, playfully. In the other three, she falls spectacularly backward, though in a different way in each, and arriving differently too.
And there are duets in which man and woman dance the same steps side by side. When Mr. Mitchell and Ms. Weber perform the “Squaregame” (1976) duet, you see close and harmonious co-existence at its most strange (those tilting knees and pelvises), glorious and compelling. But my favorite shared step occurs in “Trails” (1982), presented on the center stage by Ms. Toogood and Brandon Collwes.
A retreating step, it closely resembles one in a traditional Indian dance, and yet it looks utterly Cunningham. Slowly, slowly, they each rotate one outstretched leg round from front to back (their torsos tilting sideways), and then - sharply! - tap the foot of that leg on the floor behind them (adjusting their upper bodies); and then the same on the other leg. This too is symbiosis, but ceremonious, contented and witty.
Mr. Collwes, Julie Cunningham, Ms. Desjardins (a beautiful dancer), Daniel Madoff and Marcie Munnerlyn (whose intense absorption in the “Scramble” duet actually distracted me from Mr. Mitchell) all seemed to have broken through to new levels of artistry. And Silas Riener could be more phenomenal than any of them if only he did not sometimes dance as if he knew what was coming next.
These were the farewell performances of Holley Farmer, Koji Mizuta and Daniel Squire. All three, as their long-term colleague Ms. Goggans did, made their material look new.
@New York Times, 2009