The Body’s War Within: Stillness Versus Motion

<First published online in the New York Times on December 29, 2008>

Merce Cunningham - who has been choreographing professionally for 66 years - has long spoken of motion in stillness and stillness in motion. Certainly no choreographer has made such extraordinary use of stillness. His dancers do not stop dancing while remaining quite motionless, any more than an actor in Harold Pinter’s plays stops acting during their celebrated pauses. Often they hold long balances - some on one flat foot, others on half-toe - with an unmatched kind of repose or mystery.

These and other stillnesses were among the salient characteristics of the great nature studies Mr. Cunningham made in the last century (“Summerspace,” “Inlets” and many others). In these, like the camera in a wildlife documentary, he took us into zones undisturbed by any human. But there have also been other stillnesses in his work, and some of these have been more fraught, more expressionistic.

In “Shards” (1987), several dancers were required to stand still with their torsos tilting stiffly sideways for seven or eight minutes at a time. To the audience, it looked like nature traumatized.

In the dances Mr. Cunningham has made in the last 10 years, however - among them “Biped” (1999), “eyeSpace” (2006) and “Xover” (2007), all in his company’s current touring repertory - motionlessness has been a relatively brief and rare feature. Several of them certainly exemplify stillness within motion. The magnificent, slowly accumulating ensemble finale of “Biped,” a work whose dancers seem never to stop for more than a second; the spectacular yet intimate duet of “Interscape” (2000); and the quiet and beautifully private seven-minute adagio duet in the middle of “Xover” (pronounced “Crossover”) are all particularly marked by stillness within continuing movement.

These show us inner qualities - serenity, rigor, imperturbability - that do not change even as their physical outlines are transformed again and again. Repose is regularly cited as a prime virtue of several Asian forms of dance, and it distinguishes American classical dancing too. (The critic Edwin Denby found that its absence was one of the very few reservations he had about the Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova.)

What seems newer to Mr. Cunningham’s work - or at least surprising (in a career so complex, it is hard to be sure what is truly new) - are some striking mixtures of stillness and motion as opposed forces operating simultaneously within separate parts of the same body.

“Interscape” featured, early on, a memorable solo for Daniel Squire: during the first half he held the same position of upper body and one raised leg while hopping ardently in a wide arc across the stage. You could see just how fully the hopping leg was at work, and yet how still the rest of him remained. By contrast, in the solo’s second half it was his supporting leg that now stayed still; he, balancing on it, kept his upper body in a state of slow but continual change.

The great event of “Loose Time” (2002) was a solo for Holley Farmer across a diagonal path coming downstage. It felt like a rapid series of different thunderbolts, from one part of the body after another; and what made it exciting was that the remainder of Ms. Farmer’s body always stayed braced, never reacting to the explosion.

Mr. Cunningham’s “eyeSpace” exists in two main versions. The 20-minute one (which had its world premiere at the Joyce, in his last New York season, and widely toured in the United States and abroad) is easily remembered as the piece where the audience is encouraged to wear iPods to hear an extra layer of Mikel Rouse’s score. The 40-minute one, which has been harder to see, had its premiere in Miami in 2007.

In January the two versions were performed on consecutive nights at Stanford University. I was among several Cunningham devotees who had been unable to see the longer version until the company’s Washington season at the Kennedy Center earlier this month.

The longer “eyeSpace” features another startling Cunningham stillness/motion recipe. Its first half has the same choreography as the whole 20-minute one, although its décor and music are (at most performances) quite different. The second half, all new, changes the work’s character entirely. In particular, it features a long, slow trio where the dancers scarcely move and yet are never quite still.

Three dancers, standing, describe a triangle that occupies most of the stage, facing inward as if guarding the space. With each one remaining on a spot, they very gradually, and in near unison, keep bending from the waist, this way and that. At one point they tip forward into a right-angled hinge shape, their torsos addressing the floor; later they arch way back, their heads turned upward. And they do all this with the kind of glacierlike slowness more often associated with the dancers Eiko & Koma. Though never still, they achieve a drama akin to the dark and wracked one that I recall from “Shards,” a work not seen in 18 years but one that haunts many of us who caught it.

The trio lasts maybe 12 or 15 minutes. At one point all three dancers - keeping their upper bodies quite still - take a single step toward one another. After they have been rooted to the spot so long, it is astonishing what a difference that makes (like trees, after tossing in a storm, starting to walk) and how drastically it seems to shrink the triangle.

Should one call it a trio at all? Other groups keep coming and going during the work’s course, in a faster, though not rapid, tempo. Yet these visitors seem minor characters, ephemeral and less real. It’s strange how much more riveting these three partly riveted people are.

A pity that the design for neither version of “eyeSpace” is distinguished. The two scores are better. (There is even a third, by Annea Lockwood, which I have not yet heard.) Mr. Rouse’ s 20-minute sound collage appeals to me more when I don’t wear an iPod. But I prefer the long-held polyphonies of contrasted sonorities in David Behrman’s 40-minute score. (Better yet has been some of the music composed and played for the Cunningham company’s Events at Dia:Beacon this year.)

Having seen the 40-minute “eyeSpace” only once, I can’t actually tell you how that trio concludes. Mr. Cunningham is most often a magician when it comes to exits and entrances. He knows how to make movement act as camouflage, so that dancers arrive imperceptibly by adopting the same tempo and style as those already onstage, or depart by merging unnoticed into a larger group that acts as a wash to change the stage action.

This unnoticed disappearance of the trio is O.K., but what follows is simply much less interesting. Though I prefer this longer version, the 20-minute one has, in the duet for Mr. Squire and Julie Cunningham where they circuit the stage like a staccato modernist exhibition-ballroom duo, a more satisfying ending. Other Cunningham works this decade have had relatively weak conclusions: the final section of “Xover” is so much its least remarkable that the work leaves a feebler overall impression than its marvelous first two thirds (especially the central duet) warrant.

From the early 1990s until earlier this decade, Mr. Cunningham’s program notes drew attention to his use of a computer as a choreographic tool. These notes haven’t appeared recently, and on one occasion he mentioned that he has been using the computer less frequently in composition.

My guess is that his current interest in yoking stillness and motion as separate currents emerged from those computer studies. But who can say? It has always been evident that Mr. Cunningham has been working the computer, not it him.

@New York Times, 2008