danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

Merce Cunningham
The Company's 20th Anniversary Season at BAM

by Nicole Collins
copyright © 2000 by Nicole Collins
Spring 2000

It was not so many seasons ago that Merce Cunningham had seemed somewhat neglected by New York audiences. In theory he was a towering presence and a genius choreographer, but in practice his annual City Center engagements were far from sold out.

This past July, however, the Cunningham company received a reception from its hometown more akin to the celebrity status it enjoys abroad: Appearing at the State Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, the troupe played to sold-out, enthusiastic crowds. The mood of viewers was celebratory and reverential. Respect, not outrage, was the order of the day. No one seemed to even consider walking out in the middle of a piece, hands held protestingly over the ears—a commonplace-enough event in seasons past.

Some viewers were undoubtedly lured to the season by a minutes-long piece that paired Cunningham with Mikhail Baryshnikov. But though this premiere, appropriately titled Occasion Piece, predictably received a standing ovation from many audience members, the ovations at the conclusion of each evening were even fuller, indicating that the voluble reception was at least as much a Merce as a Misha phenomenon.

Cunningham has always focused on new work, and, true to form, each of the three State Theater programs included a New York premiere. At the same time, however, the programs also had a retrospective tone. Subtitled “A Lifetime of Dance,” each bill paired at least one early masterpiece with the newer works.

Dance fans were especially eager to see the revival of Summerspace, a 1958 work famous for its pointillist Robert Rauschenberg sets and costumes and for having been acquired by the New York City Ballet in 1966. There was a novelty element in the decision to cast six NYCB dancers in the work’s sole New York performance, but only Jenifer Ringer’s buoyant interpretation provided any kind of artistic justification for doing so. The NYCB group’s rendering of the style was inevitably fuzzy, because Cunningham’s unusual rhythms and self-contained, nonpresentational style cannot be assimilated quickly by dancers outside of his own troupe. Ringer, however, excelled at exposing the work’s light, understated wit, and Alexander Ritter was quite solid technically.

More than forty years separate this work from the premieres that followed it on the opening-night program, but all of the basic step motifs and abiding themes that we’ve come to associate with Cunningham’s work are already there. The work features his favored step palette, for instance, abounding in attitudes, passés, soutenues, renversés, chaînés, grand jetés, and pas de bourrées. It’s classical, to be sure, but classical with a chuckle. Indeed, part of the pleasure of watching Summerspace comes from imagining the fun Cunningham had making it. In one sequence, Ringer calmly drops to the floor and lifts her back legs into a Fish Dive position. One can imagine that the choreographer created this series with a mischievous smile and a twinkling eye, saying to himself, “This is a nice movement. Why does it have to be done with a partner?”

An avant-gardist but in no way a debunker, Cunningham approaches the classical vocabulary not as a hopelessly passé artifact but as insufficiently explored terrain. He has fooled around a great deal with movement rhythm and direction — “It’s not like Ethel Merman’s front and center,” he once noted — but he has applied the aesthetic theories of his time to old steps. As a result, his dances are ironically now more profoundly classical than much contemporary ballet choreography. Among other things, his dances still pay exquisite, downright old-fashioned attention to line, while contemporary trends in both the ballet and modern dance worlds privilege momentum over position, sketched gestures over sculpted ones.

There is nothing classical, of course, about Cunningham’s and the late John Cage’s insistence that choreography and score remain independent of one another. In Summerspace, there is a complete disconnect between Morton Feldman’s thin, hazy cloud of woodwind and brass sounds and the dance’s highly rhythmic sequences. The utter incompatibility of music and dance jars the viewer in the same way that one would be jarred by viewing a film with the wrong soundtrack. Framed in this way, the dancing appears far more austere and strange than it really is.

The Summerspace score, which, to nonspecialist ears at least, sounds both anarchic and solemn, often obscures the wit and whimsy of the dancing. In one particularly funny sequence, Ritter and Ringer, each entirely self-absorbed, run at full tilt along different trajectories before nearly colliding. Averting disaster, each abruptly brakes and stares impassively at the other. They subsequently dance not so much together as face to face, continuing in a scuttling face-to-face bourrée as they exit — she backward, he forward. At the last moment, Ritter swoops Ringer up and carries her, dolllike, in her standing position. Just before disappearing into the wings, she raises her hand in a deadpan good-bye salute to the audience. In Cunningham’s universe, one is as unlikely to see two dancers fall in love as to witness an emotional transaction between two birds in a park. Yet in a mimelike, understated way, this scene connotes being swept off one’s feet by love at first sight.

The new BIPED was without question the highlight among the new works (in addition to Occasion Piece, the company gave the New York premiere of a 1998 work called Pond Way). For me, it reinstated magic to Cunningham’s world, a world that, for all its tranquil beauty, can sometimes seem a little workmanlike. Fittingly, this magic was generated through new technology, which Cunningham has long embraced. BIPED pioneered the use of a new motion-capture animation technology. Digital projections turned the stage space into a magical lantern in which multicolored lozenge shapes rained down over the dancers and white spheres spun across a midnight blue sky.

As is his wont, Cunningham pulled these high-tech tricks out of his hat gradually and with discretion, never seeking to impress the audience with sheer visual overkill. He presented his most-impressive trick, in fact, only a few times during the long piece: Every so often, a faceless animated figure nearly as tall as the proscenium itself would perform Cunningham’s choreography across the stage space and over the live dancers. In one particularly witty sequence, the figure performed a series of sauts de basques across the stage, reminding me of a digital-age Red Riding Hood skipping among the dancers grouped below, who seemed like so many tiny trees.

BIPED is set to a beautiful, even danceable electronic score commissioned from Gavin Bryars. The music has a film-score expansiveness, and its harmonies and propulsion convey optimism despite a mournful melody for the cello. The piece opens on a stage space bathed in icy blue light. Glen Rumsey, wearing an iridescent unitard cut off at midthigh, performs an opening solo and then recedes into the back wall of the stage. At the last moment, he seems to dissolve away, and as he does so, Jean Freebury appears from another part of the back wall, materializing with the same phantom incorporeity as that with which Rumsey disappeared. In the context of the futuristic score, the dissolve effect suggested a Star Trek-style beaming up and beaming down. And as the series of solos proceeded and gave way to larger groupings, black bands began to ripple across the blue box of light that was the stage, past and through the moving figures. The projections seemed three-dimensional, creating the illusion that the air was a pool of lighted water. For all its sophistication, the opening-night audience gasped.

Many of the choreographic motifs reminded me of other recent large-scale Cunningham pieces. Over the years, Cunningham has increasingly embroidered his movement phrases, even though the base legwork has altered little. At its most effective, this busyness achieves a kaleidoscopic fluidity, as the dancers dissolve seamlessly from one multifaceted position to another with protean ease. However, when the tempo becomes particularly fast, I feel this busyness begins to look a little unnatural, and one becomes too aware of Cunningham’s process of choreographing separately for legs and torso.

My favorite moments in most Cunningham dances come in the duets and the partnering sequences, and BIPED was no exception. There was a lovely, brief moment, for instance, when Cheryl Therrien is sent swimming through the air by three guys, who swoop her down and up through the air as though she were a fish gliding in the deep blue light. In a more extended passage, Thomas Caley enters from upstage carrying Banu Ogan high in a front-facing split. The slow-moving, stately sequence has a ritualistic quality, with Ogan like a sacred object or a goddess. Ogan and Caley exist in a world where time moves very slowly, but not far from them on the stage a threesome has been moving at an almost spastic pace. Eventually, the trio wends its way off, leaving the other two alone. Once on the ground, Ogan performs a series of promenades, her working leg passing over Caley’s head and torso as he lunges deeply in a long-held pose. This moment reminded me of Balanchine’s Serenade, and there were further echoes of that work when the two dancers did a Mercian variation of a waltz step in a circle, he forward, she backward. He offered her first one arm, then another, and she responded with a little bowing movement each time.

About two-thirds of the way through, the men come on in diaphanous pantsuits, and each man cloaks each lady onstage with a matching diaphanous tunic. This inaugurates a more tender section, with a great deal of partnering and a looser, more rapturous movement language. The entire sequence suggests an angelic realm, or at the very least some Elysian field. One might reasonably expect the piece to end on this note, but instead it turns out to be just a temporary gear shift, and gradually more and more dancers appear onstage without the tunics. Teleology is anathema to Cunningham, but he doesn’t mind making a provocative suggestion now and then.

Some viewers found great profundity in the new Occasion Piece, but I found it just an occasion piece. Cunningham, who at 80 is now not only exceedingly arthritic but noticeably frail, shared the stage with Baryshnikov, who is as Apollonian as ever despite occasional technical wobbles. Baryshnikov was dispatched to perform soft, arcing grand jetés and long-held arabesque balances among the scattered translucent boxes of the set. (Jasper Johns’s refrigerator-size, almost inflatable-looking, enlargements of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, which Johns created for the 1968 dance Walkaround Time.) The celebrity dancer looked the picture of dutifulness gracefully carrying out the choreographic equivalent of an errand, while Cunningham seemed an impish elf literally upstaging him with gnomish arm paddlings and foot shufflings at two barres placed discreetly behind the set pieces. There was enough suggestive material here to speculate about various forms of power — physical power and its decline, the power of choreographer over dancer, and the power of a star dancer over the box office — but my reaction was more cynical. I saw little more than a good photo opportunity in the idea of bringing the famous dancer onstage together with the famous choreographer and the famous set.

Besides BIPED, my two favorite works shown this season were Sounddance (1975) and the more recent Ground Level Overlay (1995). Ground Level Overlay is an unusually tender piece in the Cunningham oeuvre. Pas de deux is the work’s major motif, the theme on which Cunningham spins his endless variations. Yellow, late-afternoon light bathes the succession of couples, who even at times embrace, bringing a hint of emotion into choreography that is usually rigorously unemotional. A haunting score sets trombones reverberating every so often in melancholic fanfares.

Sounddance is so tailor-made for the tomboyish exuberance of Jean Freebury that one could almost imagine that Cunningham revived it especially for her. Freebury is a marvelous dancer who throws herself into movement, attacking each dance as though she might never have a chance to do it again. In Sounddance, she has the opportunity to literally throw herself about, as she hurls herself toward first one guy then another. Clasping her arms about the man’s neck, she allows her legs to be manipulated like streamers by the others, first lifted out into a floating starfish shape, then folded into a V-shape straddling her partner’s waist.

Sounddance opens with longtime company dancer Robert Swinston (who is also assistant to the choreographer) pumping his legs to the drilling noises of David Tudor’s loud, wacky, and wonderful score. The movements suggest that he is revving up for the dance that will ensue, and, indeed, the dance itself is the most cut-loose and least controlled of any Cunningham piece I have seen. Animated almost to the point of frenzy, the piece’s high spirits and its movement vocabulary suggest children on a playground. The dancers form circles around each other and push and pull and swing one another around. Banu Ogan, who is the company’s preeminent legato dancer, the serene adagio female voice who so effectively complements Freebury’s allegro tones, performs a calm series of promenade arabesques amid all the rambunctiousness. Later, I came to dub her the “pop-up girl,” because she is repeatedly lifted in between two of the men in a sous-sus lift, from which she does a quick bend to the side and then back up to the vertical again, a movement which has a jack-in-the-box quality. At another point, she is carried forward in a side split between two men, forming a low bridge for Swinston to crawl under.

The dancers in Sounddance also evoke carnival performers, perhaps because of the makeshift-looking gold curtains that drape across the back of the stage. The performers make their entrances through these curtains, and they twirl back through them for their exits, suggesting soap bubbles disappearing down a drain. Freebury, one of the last to exit, runs toward the others and kneads her feet into the ground as though pleading for a little more playtime. One of those thus beseeched picks her up and twirls her around and around and around until, set down at last, she dizzily continues the spinning motion, spinning on and on as though compelled by an outside force. Swinston, who was the first to enter the stage, is the last to exit it, hurtling off with barreling chaîné turns.

Sounddance boasts the control and precision of all of Cunningham’s work, but it also has a spontaneity that humanizes the dancers, so that one can enjoy them as performers in their own right instead of as vehicles for the choreography. Too often, I feel that the dancers are subsumed into the works, each interpreter merely another element in Cunningham’s vast compositional fugue. This is for me a less enjoyable component of his style. To be sure, Cunningham’s choreography reveals a great deal about how well his company members can dance — and they dance very well — but it reveals little about who they are. Except for Freebury, the dancers are a cipher to me. Still, she, Ogan, Thomas Caley, Robert Swinston, and Glen Rumsey are all magnificent dancers, and the entire troupe of 15 dancers is very strong.