Merce Cunningham: centenary essay

Commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and published in two Royal Ballet programmes in autumn 2019.

Throughout his long life, Merce Cunningham was fascinated in theatre itself, from the Greeks to Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. As a choreographer, he invented a radically new form of dance theatre – or several – that in turn fascinated many theatre-makers of his day, including Lindsay Anderson, Peter Brook, and Meredith Monk. Under the Cunningham aegis, the choreographer (himself), the composer, and the designer would create their work in independence of one another. (Cunningham would tell the composer how long the work would be; and he’d tell the designer how many dancers there would be, and which ones. Sometimes he added a note like “There’ll be some fast passages”; sometimes he gave vaguely expressive clues like “Think of weather”; occasionally he gave further clues.) The dancers and he only discovered what they would wear and what their musical accompaniment would be around the time of the dress rehearsal or first night.

So, in place of the established tradition where dancers responded to their music, here was a genre in which dancers – who rehearsed in silence - embodied their own music. To use words from T.S.Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, Cunningham dancers are “Music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are

The music, while the music lasts.”

But Cunningham, though inventing a new kind of dance theatre, was rediscovering old sources of dance. People have often spoken of the dances of birds and animals; Cunningham, fascinated by both since childhood, saw them as co-dancers. One of the early solos he made for himself was “Boy who Wanted to be a Bird” (1951).

It’s also widely thought that the earliest human forms of music were created by dancing feet: feet making rhythm on floors. Again, Cunningham had learnt this kind of music-making in his adolescence: he had trained in tap dance in his early teens. Sometimes he made dances to music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Ravel: he just didn’t let the dancers hear the music he had in mind. But they felt that his music suffused them. Jeannie Steele, who danced in Cunningham’s company for over fourteen years (1993-2007) and now teaches his technique in London, recently recalled about dancing Cunningham choreography, “I was full of songs and sonatas as I danced!” Jazz, too. Many Cunningham dancers, while remembering that his work was full of what the Gershwins called “fascinatin’ rhythm,” say that its inner music was more complex than rhythm alone – it had melodies, structures, and many kinds of phrasing. “Merce would say ‘Rhythm’s one thing, but phrasing’s another,” Steele recalls: “’For phrasing,’ he’d say, ‘You have to listen to Billie Holiday.’”  

Over the decades, Cunningham dance theatre contained many works in which composer, designer, and Cunningham seemed to be, as the British say, singing from the same hymn sheet. Cunningham “Suite for Five” (1956”), “Summerspace” (1958), “RainForest” (1968), “Inlets” (1977), “Duets” (1980), “Roaratorio” (1983), “Pictures” (1984), “Beachbirds” (1991), “Pond Way” (1998), and “BIPED” (1999) are all classic examples of theatrical harmony. The music and dance, proceeding separately but in accord, co-operate in each case with costumes and décor to create a satisfying stage world.

Often the composer was John Cage (1912-1992), Cunningham’s life partner. The two men first developed their brand of dance theater with Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), the painter who designed “Suite for Five,” “Summerspace,” and many other pieces. But Cunningham also worked with many other composers and designers: Gavin Bryars, Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff, among the musicians; Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, among the painters.

Only sometimes, however, did the art forms meet in harmony. Cunningham made plenty of works where the artistic elements seemed to be at cross-purposes – where the music in particular created an environment hostile to the dance. This, too, was a deliberate part of Cunningham dance theater. There’s an original-cast film of “Variations V” (1966) in which Cunningham’s leading female dancer, Carolyn Brown, has an extended solo, over five minutes long, while the music plays a range of radio distortion, buzzes, and other distractions. The sets, by Nam June Paik and Stan VanDer Beek, features pot-plants, film projections; and other dancers come and go while Brown continues. As theatre, this is an essay in Dadaist absurdism - but Brown’s dancing gives it a beautifully spiritual purpose. Calmly, raptly, she dances on as if the distractions of noise and people could never deter her from her mission. She seems inspired; she becomes inspiring.

There were many other Cunningham creations in which dance and sound seemed at odds; the music was often difficultly noisy. There were few Cunningham performances at which someone did not walk out; around the time of his eightieth birthday, his younger brother, Jack, asked him “When are you going to make something the public likes?” (Cunningham dryly told this story a few weeks later, after the premiere of “BIPED” had been greeted with an ecstatic ovation.) Here was a tradition of modernism that had its sources in such nineteenth-century radicals as the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who spoke of “le derèglement des sens” – the disordering of the senses. Cunningham and his associates were making theatre that reflected modern world, with all its multiplicity, its traffic, its distractions, and its jarring juxtapositions.

One of the great classroom teachers, he forged a brilliant technique, which has become known worldwide as one of the finest training systems in dance, especially in its powerful and detailed use of the back. It combined aspects of ballet and modern techniques. But even at this fundamental level, Cunningham challenged people’s idea of what was or seemed organic in the body’s motion. Dancers love to talk about movement that feels natural - yet much of this is mere habit. (Balanchine dancers often find the complex co-ordination of Ashton to be counter-intuitive, while Ashton dancers find Balanchine style unduly acrobatic.) Cunningham, instead, liked to test dancers’ instincts – and his own. His classes excited because they stretched dancers’ minds as much as their bodies.

He also used chance procedures – shaking dice or tossing coins – to reach unforeseen sequences, combinations, and directions of motion. This use of chance, which he began to use in the early 1950s, was as deeply controversial as his separation of dance from music. He wrote in 1952 that the tossing of pennies, to find his dance resources within the play of bodies in space and time, he was coming into contact with something “far greater than my own personal inventiveness could ever be, much more universally human than the particular habits of my own practice, and organically rising out of common pools of motor impulses.”

Cunningham was friends with many abstract artists – Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt – but he firmly resisted “abstract” as an adjective for his kind of dance of anyone else’s. At the core of Cunningham dance theatre are the basic facts of human beings doing movement – an activity not abstract but factual. As he wrote in the same 1952 essay, The Impermanent Art:

I am no more philosophical than my legs, but from them I sense this fact: that they are infused with energy that can be released in movement (to appear to be motionless is its own kind of intoxicating movement) – that the shape the movement takes is beyond the fathoming of my mind’s analysis but clear to my eyes and rich to my imagination. In other words, a man is a two-legged creature – more basically and more intimately than he is anything else. And his legs speak more than they “know” – and so does all nature. So if you really dance – your body, that is, and not your mind’s enforcement – the manifestations of the spirit through your torso and your limbs will inevitably take on the shape of life. We give ourselves away at every moment.

Like the French Existentialists, he came into his own as an artist in the 1940s; like them, he believed that individuals determine their own essence. No form of composition was more basic to him than the solo. Soloism for him was a crucial aspect of Cunningham dance theatre: a dance for two or three people will often show just that – that two or three different people are differently involved, not that they have become a single unit. The Cunningham company contained some performers who had qualities of animal intensity, others who specialized in rigorous purity: his theatrical idiom had room for both, just as it had room for people of different shapes, sizes, colours, and capacities.

Yet even while he advocated movement that was just about movement, Cunningham also often pursued ambiguity, which he connected to poetic expression. Many of the titles of his pieces point two ways: “Summerspace” (1958) could mean “summer space” or “summer’s pace”; “Loosestrife” (1991) could be “Loose strife” or the flower “loosestrife.” Did the title “RainForest” (1968) refer to the Pacific Northwest rainforest Cunningham had discovered in his childhood (in which case the piece may have an autobiographical aspect) or the rainforests of Central Africa (Cunningham had been reading the anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s book “The Forest People”, about the pygmies of the Belgian Congo). Either; both.

The title “Cross Currents” (1964) referred to both the dance’s rhythmic qualities (its three dancers may diverge in time before finally arriving together) and to its spatial structure (the three take paths that continually intersect). The dance has memorable images in which its performers hold certain shapes even as they pivot on one leg: the interplay between stillness and movement was a recurrent theme for Cunningham. (“Cross Currents” was the first of several Cunningham dances that had its world premiere in London. The success of the Cunningham company’s 1964 London season put the company on the world dance map before it had firmly arrived on the American one.)

“Sounddance” (1975) takes its title from a line in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “In the beginning was the sounddance.” The dance tells a tale of creation and destruction. The lead dancer (originally Cunningham himself) enters through a central flap in the décor, as if from a black hole in space; others follow. There’s little stillness here: these dancers seem constantly pulled, one way or another, as if by huge forces. They leave the stage the way they came; the male soloist last. The whole drama is urgent (“The general impression is of a space observed under a microscope,” wrote Cunningham), as if time itself is running out. Watching, you cannot avoid the sense of drama and wealth of detail. As in all his dance theatre, Cunningham leaves it to you just what is being said.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2019