{"id":167,"date":"2011-09-15T10:56:36","date_gmt":"2011-09-15T14:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=167"},"modified":"2011-09-19T22:32:44","modified_gmt":"2011-09-20T02:32:44","slug":"merce-redivivus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2011\/09\/merce-redivivus\/","title":{"rendered":"Merce Redivivus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Stand in a summer field at dusk, and you\u2019re surrounded by a silence that only seems silent. Intermittently a bird calls, a wild apple falls from a tree, a sudden wind ruffles leaves. In the distance, a figure bends down to pick something.\u00a0 On a busy city street, it\u2019s almost impossible not to be in motion and enveloped by motion and noise. The soundscape is dense with the whoosh of traffic, human babble, horns, sirens.<\/p>\n

These thoughts were stirred up by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company\u2019s performances at Bard College, September 9 through 11. The program opened with Cunningham\u2019s Suite for Five <\/em>(1956-58), an essay in stillness, punctuated by clear, serene bursts of motion and intermittent musical tones. The final work was the 1975 Sounddance<\/em>, a carnival of high intensity, high density visual and aural patterns. In between these, a kind of unintended buffer: Antic Meet<\/em> (1958), a witty revue made up of eccentric little acts\u2014a performance about a performance.<\/p>\n

Cunningham composed Suite for Five<\/em> by the same chance methods that John Cage employed in writing its score (from his Music for Piano<\/em>). The process involved marking the imperfections in sheets of transparent paper to determine spatial patterns (in the 1950s, we were all conversant with high-quality bond, onionskin, and tracing paper) and layering them over one another to find where dancers would intersect. Placing these over sheet music paper might yield a time element.<\/p>\n

Perhaps as a result of this process, Suite for Five<\/em> is as much about silence and stillness as it is about sound and motion. Each single tone that pianist Joseph Kubera chooses to draw from his instrument\u2014whether by pressing a key, plucking a string, or tapping the wood\u2014 falls into the silence like a small stone into a pond and seems unique in beauty and resonance. When Daniel Madoff begins the piece in a near corner of the stage, his every move has a similar clarity. Squatting, he slowly slides one foot forward and stretches his leg, then returns it and stretches the other; the image\u2014somewhat like an elegant, slow-motion line drawing of that lusty Russian step, the prisyadka\u2014<\/em>burns itself onto the luminous stage and into your brain.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown rehearsing Suite in Grenoble, 1972. Photo: James Klosty<\/p><\/div>\n

In the 1950s, Cunningham\u2019s company was small, and the dancers in Suite for Five<\/em> only occasionally appear at the same time. In the final quintet and in the trio performed at Bard by Rashaun Mitchell, Marcie Munnerlyn, and Jamie Scott, people most often pursue separate activities at different speeds. One of them may skitter around with fast little steps, another unfurl a slow balance, another stride into deep, wide lunges. If they meet, it seems as if by accident and without warning, which results in such images as Munnerlyn and Scott standing close together, facing each other, while Mitchell supports himself in a precarious slant low to the floor by putting his arms around both women\u2019s waists and holding tight.<\/p>\n

The duet, originally performed by Cunningham and Carolyn Brown (and danced at Bard by Madoff and Andrea Weber), evokes a ballet pas de deux in some subtle, fascinatingly disarranged way. In Beverly Emmons\u2019s shading-into-night illumination, Madoff kneels, bearing Weber, stretched out in flight on his shoulder; slowly and carefully he revolves without disturbing her equipoise. Or she leans, slanting against him; or he crouches, cradling her. Without warning together they explode into a spate of jumps like ballet sissonnes. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I\u2019ve heard people describe Cunningham movements as \u201cballetic.\u201d It\u2019s true that he favors articulate, turned-out legs that swoop high; finely arched feet; and an elongated spine. Yet these movements are performed without ballet\u2019s look-at-the-picture manner or the time-honored emphasis on beauty of line. And deviations abound. In Sounddance<\/em>, Apollonian calm is sorely tested. How swiftly can a dancer stalk around on tiptoe? How rapidly thrash into a position and out of it again? How intersect with others in formations that could easily become train wrecks?<\/p>\n

Mark Lancaster\u2019s set is an elaborately draped curtain that spans the stage, but hangs from a bar only the height of a ceiling, with a black space above it. Through a hidden gap at its center burst the dancers, costumed identically in pale blue tights and snug gold tops. Rushing in one at a time, they might be circus performers late for an entrance, but they set about performing without fanfare. They are surrounded by David Tudor\u2019s thunderous score (electronically manipulated by John King). Listening to it is like being inside a storm, with all the variations in timbre and tone sliding around but never stopping. The dancers ride it like people hastening to finish all they have to do before a tornado strikes\u2014jumping, leaping, prancing, ducking under or vaulting over barriers, flocking, hanging onto one another to accomplish an intricate task.<\/p>\n

Various of the ten superb and valiant company members (Robert Swinston, Brandon Collwes, Jennifer Goggans, Silas Riener, Melissa Toogood, John Hinrichs, Mitchell, Munnerlyn, Scott, and Weber) may join briefly in unison dancing, but more often they\u2019re racing about\u2014with Swinston, in Cunningham\u2019s role, often seeming to supervise or complete a pattern, or to prevent someone from being blown away. The stage is awash with activity that keeps precision and wildness in balance. At one point, three men repeatedly swing a woman high, the bridge her body forms angled now this way, now that. Meanwhile, in the background, Swinston and three others, linked together, twist and pull against their clasped hands.<\/p>\n

I learned from David Vaughan\u2019s magnificent and magisterial book, Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years<\/em>, that just before Cunningham composed Sounddance<\/em>, he had been given a microscope and was enthralled by the wiggling organisms it revealed. That may explain why I scribbled \u201cDANTE\u201d in my Bard program. In several clusters, waving their arms about, the dancers suggest snake pits or souls writhing in an inferno of their own making.<\/p>\n

When, in the end, the performers exit singly or close behind one another, they look as if they\u2019re tearing themselves away, or being sucked offstage by a powerful force. Swinston, as ringmaster of this diabolic circus, is the last to leave, and he doesn\u2019t waste a second bolting through the golden curtain.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Antic Meets <\/em>acts as a leavening to these two pieces. \u00a0If you dreamed of vaudeville gone awry, you couldn\u2019t come up with anything this seriously zany. Christopher McIntyre\u2019s occasionally braying trombone contributes mightily to the ruckus stirred up in John Cage\u2019s music by Kubera\u2019s piano, David Behrman\u2019s violin, and John King\u2019s viola.<\/p>\n

A woman (Goggans) who emerges from a free-standing door that seemingly walks by itself dances sweetly with a man (Madoff) who has a chair strapped to his back (handy when she needs to rest and preen). Goggans and Krista Nelson do pretty-footed stuff like semi-ballerinas but also mime their rivalry; Nelson lobs invisible stones, Goggans retaliates by sloshing an invisible bucket of water at her.\u00a0 In the section \u201cBacchus and Cohorts,\u201d Daniel Madoff struggles to find openings in the many-armed sweater he\u2019s trapped in, while Goggans, Nelson, Toogood, and Emma Desjardins stalk about in the wonderful parachute dresses devised by Robert Rauschenberg, looking suspiciously like a Martha Graham chorus\u2014only more insouciantly threatening.\u00a0 Madoff\u2014valiantly slapping his swaying hips, even though he has given up on finding a hole to poke his head through\u2014finally gestures \u201cbegone!\u201d and they oblige.<\/p>\n

Even though these performers (Dylan Crossman is the sixth member of the cast) sometimes muff the comic timing and dramatic flair that Cunningham excelled at (thereby obscuring some of the points he was making), they attack the ten \u201cnumbers\u201d in this artful and endearing little satire with verve.<\/p>\n

Knowing that MCDC will disappear after December 31, 2011, fans and first-timers flock to every performance they can. We may never again see dancers who\u2019ve been schooled by the choreographer perform these works. There\u2019s no stigma attached to hoarding when we\u2019re collecting memories to get us through the Cunningham-sparse winter to come.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stand in a summer field at dusk, and you\u2019re surrounded by a silence that only seems silent. Intermittently a bird calls, a wild apple falls from a tree, a sudden wind ruffles leaves. In the distance, a figure bends down to pick something.\u00a0 On a busy city street, it\u2019s almost impossible not to be in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[130,127,106,128,129],"class_list":{"0":"post-167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-contemporary-dance","8":"tag-antic-meet","9":"tag-mcdc","10":"tag-merce-cunningham","11":"tag-sounddance","12":"tag-suite-for-five","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}