In the Cunningham Dimension, Multiplicities in Time and Space
<First published online in the New York Times on February 22, 2009>
Merce Cunningham’s Beacon Events over the weekend were frustrating on purpose. You could have put all the choreography on one stage at Dia:Beacon, and it would have lasted more than two and a half hours. Instead Mr. Cunningham arranged the material to last 35 minutes on five stages simultaneously. The stages were arranged around a large space, with walls between some of them. A few people would have been able to watch three of them, but chances were you could see less than half of what was going on. That was the point.
It was also the point if you concentrated on just one stage. Split-focus multiplicity is often a basic condition of Cunningham dance theater (and one reason his work reminds me of Chekhov’s plays, in which two dissimilar things so often coincide). You’ll see several dancers on one stage doing simultaneous solos. By the time you’ve decided that these solos add up to a noncontiguous quartet (trio, quintet, duet, whatever), the action will have changed, with an exit or an entrance or some partnering.
Even when you’re observing a dancer alone onstage doing a solo, you’re frequently aware of a multiplicity that’s not simultaneous but sequential. Now she’s jumping looking up; now she’s lying flat on the floor; now she’s balancing on one foot, bending her torso one way and extending her other leg in another. Cunningham dancers constantly say, like Whitman, “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself/(I am large, I contain multitudes).”
More curious yet is how two or more dancers will contradict themselves the same way at the same moment. Just as you watch a man and woman settling into one kind of responsive behavior in a duet (maybe some modernist variant on male chivalric support of the female in adagio), the action and tempo will change into something else (maybe man and woman moving side by side, in steps similar or identical, around the stage in brisk andante).
Though both sections are likely to be choreographically remarkable, that sudden and effortless change of gear is even more striking. It always comes as a surprise; and it tells us that people, even within harmonious intimacy, are inexplicable, impossible to pigeonhole.
On Saturday afternoon I watched the dancing on two adjacent stages. Even on those it was remarkable how much I missed; if I could have returned on Sunday, I might well have chosen just to look at those two stages again, to check out features that only began to seem salient when it was too late. Jennifer Goggans and Koji Mizuta kept cropping up together in duets. (Their spruce rhythm and springing footwork are always pleasures.) I wanted to attend more closely to the gamut of human variety through which they so naturally passed.
Astonishing things happened. Andrea Weber danced a duet (from “Way Station,” 2002) with Brandon Collwes: the way she held moments of suspense before suddenly falling backward into his arms recalled the sublime Suzanne Farrell in Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” adagio. Yet in a solo immediately beforehand Ms. Weber had been squatting, knees bent and legs wide apart, on half-toe, with her torso bent far forward and her arms and shoulders a single vertical line aimed at the floor like a spear.
What has that slashing upper-body line in common with that perched and spread-eagled lower-body shape? Such feats and contrasts might appear bizarre; Cunningham dancers make them natural.
Mr. Cunningham’s duets are one of the two genres in which it is easiest, though never easy, to pin meanings to what’s going on; his nature studies are the other. Duets abounded on Saturday; and though there was no true nature study, Mr. Cunningham’s work always has passages of pure academic dance that, in their focus, dynamics and arrangement, seem to hold a mirror up to nature. Five women doing different but related adagio at the same time (as at the beginning of this Event) will, without the least mimicry, recall deer in a meadow or birds on the wing.
Events are new anthologies of Cunningham choreography old and new. The impressions of deliberately frustrating complexity and brevity on Saturday proved a complete change from the “History Matters” program at the Merce Cunningham Studio on Feb. 9. This performance-cum-panel-discussion surveyed his work of the 1990s. That ought to have been a decade of artistic recession for Mr. Cunningham: John Cage, his closest artistic associate, died in 1992; Mr. Cunningham mainly worked with designers new to his work; and he began in 1991 to present dances that he had initially composed on a computer.
Yet his rehearsal motto remained: “This may not be possible, but let’s try.” And this session demonstrated how Cunningham dance theater, in “Ground Level Overlay” (1995, a work in which purposeful animal-like life becomes both intimate and heroic), “Pond Way” (1998, Cunningham’s last nature study and purest evocation of Thoreau) and “Biped” (1999, a cornucopia in which he seems to address aspects of transcendence) achieved fusions of choreography, music and design that remain miraculously satisfying.
On Feb. 6 the Cunningham company’s Repertory Understudy Group performed the rigorously layered “Rune” (1959) and extensive excerpts from the intense, witty “Squaregame” (1976) at the 92nd St Y. Here, because of the more prolonged nature of the dances, you felt more keenly than ever how precisely Mr. Cunningham achieves the style for each that is its peculiar secret. Which observers - which dancers, even - can define exactly what ingredients of dynamics and spacing make a work cohere?
“Rune” is 50 years old; some material at Dia:Beacon was new; the half-century between has seen a vast range of idiom. Yet there are things that all Cunningham choreography has in common, above all, the use of legs and feet.
When we walk, we have a moment of bending the supporting knee as we advance the other leg and, soon after, a moment when our weight is on the ball of one foot before the other foot arrives in place. Cunningham takes these two aspects of legwork and develops them to extremes nobody has ever approached: his dancers recurrently balance on half-toe (sometimes precariously difficult), and they all stand or move on one bent supporting knee while stretching the other leg this way or that (often with luscious effects of texture and line).
Anybody watching Cunningham choreography will have seen these basic factors of dance style again and again. Only this month did I recognize how, watching, we feel in them the basic mechanics of our own pedestrian movement. The dancers take what we do and make it stratospheric.
@New York Times, 2009