Merce Cunningham's "Fleeting moment when you feel alive"
by Elizabeth Zimmer
JULY 28, 2009 TAGS:
“You have to love dancing to stick to it,” Merce Cunningham once wrote. “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”
Cunningham died Sunday evening, in his sleep at his loft in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. He was 90 years old. He had been dancing most of his life, choreographing for more than 64 years, and directing a distinguished ensemble since 1953. All day on July 27th, New Yorkers whose lives have been touched, and often changed, by the brilliant dance-maker showed up at his downtown headquarters.
Videos played quietly in a rear studio, while current and former company members, prepared for the inevitable but still not quite believing it had come, embraced all comers, and shared stories from the troupe’s life. Dozens of other choreographers, their professional lives kick-started by the rigor and vision they discovered in Cunningham’s classes, greeted friends and colleagues and testified to his impact on the culture of American dance.
On our first date, my future husband took me to a performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in a gymnasium at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The poster for the show (a big red, yellow and blue target), and the spare scenery (moveable posts connected by tapes, like the ones that herd you into lanes at airport security), were designed by artist Jasper Johns.
As near as I can recall, 40 years after the fact, this performance was an early “event”: a collage Cunningham put together of sections from his proscenium dances, often to different music than that which first accompanied them, staged specifically for a non-traditional space like a gym, a palace courtyard, or a platform on somebody’s lawn. I was swept off my feet. Forty years later I still love to watch the astonishingly focused Cunningham performers work their uninflected magic.
Cunningham, who won every award the dance world and foundations had to offer, emerged as a major figure in the international art world long before American audiences took him seriously.
Some critics call him the first post-modern choreographer; others say he was the only post-modern choreographer, and that everyone since has been merely post-Merce. His dancers are strong, fleet, upright; they combine the technical prowess required for ballet with modern’s more flexible spine, bare feet, and a creatureliness that transcends ballet’s customary romantic plots.
Rejecting utterly the passionate narrative style of Martha Graham, Cunningham made pieces whose only material was movement. He often drew concepts, and titles, from the scientific universe. Feelings might well up in a viewer, but provoking those feelings was not his intention.
The order of steps, of exits and entrances, of meetings and partings on the stage were often determined by chance procedures, like throwing the I Ching, methods Cunningham developed to undercut his own habits, to constantly generate innovative movement designs.
The company performs not to music but with it: the choreographer was famous — some would say infamous — for pairing his dances with scores commissioned from avant-garde electronic composers. He’d ask for, say, 20 minutes of music. He’d then construct a 20-minute piece, measured with a stopwatch, often requiring the performers to move faster and faster to make the movement fit the time frame.
The dancers usually heard the music for the first time on opening night, when it would be played live on a bank of synthesizers or other electronic equipment, in the pit or at one side of the stage. For one piece musicians blew into conch shells; for another answering machine messages were broadcast. At last week’s Jacob’s Pillow concerts, composer John King, in the pit, played electronic distortions, poignantly bluesy, of chords rendered by a Dobro steel guitar, for a 1993 work called “CRWDSPCR.”
Cunningham’s final collaboration with John Cage, the 1994 “Ocean,” set the dancers in the middle of a circle, surrounded by the audience on bleachers, which in turn was surrounded by a symphony orchestra playing music by David Tudor and Andrew Culver. Huge clock faces visible to dancers, audience, and musicians alike helped us all keep our places in the 90-minute work.
Born in Centralia, Washington, in 1919, the young Mercier Cunningham, son of a lawyer, learned tap and ballroom dancing. After an abortive stint at university in Washington, D.C., he moved to Seattle and enrolled at the Cornish School, an arts academy where he encountered Graham dancer Bonnie Bird. Martha Graham herself, the mistress of modern dance who drew on serious themes — Greek tragedy, pioneer history, Native American ritual — met the tall young man at a summer program she taught at Mills College in Oakland, California in 1939, and invited him to become the second man in her company.
While performing with Graham, Cunningham studied ballet and met John Cage, one of the century’s most significant musical figures; the pair collaborated, in art and in life, until Cage’s death in 1992. Cage’s compositional and philosophical iconoclasm — and his Zen attitudes — deeply influenced Cunningham; his generosity provided the troupe with a Volkswagen bus for touring (won by answering quiz-show questions about mushrooms) and many gourmet meals on the road. (Cage also drove the bus.)
Other composers who contributed include Morton Feldman, David Behrman, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Gordon Mumma, and more recently Sonic Youth and Mikel Rouse. Similarly iconoclastic visual artists supported the company since its founding at Black Mountain College in 1953. Robert Rauschenberg designed and built costumes and sets, and often stage-managed performances. In 1968, Andy Warhol floated huge silver Mylar pillows in the air over a dance called “Rainforest.”
Bruce Nauman, Frank Stella, and Robert Morris designed works in the first 20 years. More recently Cunningham collaborated with filmmakers like Charles Atlas and Elliot Caplan, making both “dance for camera” and brilliant documentaries. Distinguished alumni of the 56-year-old troupe include Steve Paxton, who went on to develop contact improvisation; Carolyn Brown, whose recent memoir Chance and Circumstance chronicles the company’s first 20 years; and Douglas Dunn, a quirky choreographer who continues to delight audiences.
Dancing at every performance until he turned 70, Cunningham, always reserved but friendly, then began to experiment with using computer programs to generate movement, finding new ways to rotate a limb or tilt a performer off-center. He was among the first to incorporate motion capture into his stage designs, in a glorious 1999 work called “Biped.” With a score by Gavin Bryars, the work used technology developed by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar to float images of the dancers in space. The piece had a profoundly elegiac quality.
Cunningham pioneered in the development of dance film, understanding the radical difference between the human eye and the camera lens, adapting his choreography for television while other artists still feared allowing their dances to be recorded. Some interesting pieces resulted from moving works originally made for film onto the stage.
For decades the Cunningham’s company has worked in the penthouse studio at Westbeth, the artists’ housing complex on the western edge of Greenwich Village, where its popular classes serve as an entry point for thousands of young dancers from all over the world. His works remain in the repertories of ballet companies, and will continue to be available, with the services of guest repetiteurs, even after the company concludes a final two-year tour and then disbands, a radical decision announced just a few weeks ago.
Cunningham recently published, with Aperture, Other Animals, a volume of the charming colored-pencil drawings of animals he made every morning to warm up his hands, his perception, and his imagination.
Working from a wheelchair in his last years, he was still choreographing days before his death, telling company interviewer Nancy Dalva that, as with the deaf composer Beethoven, making dances had become a “habit of mind.”
*****
Cunningham’s current 13-member company performs free “events” this weekend, Saturday evening Aug. 1 at 6 and Sunday Aug. 2 at 2 and 6, at lower Manhattan’s Rockefeller Park. For further information, call 212-242-0800. Fascinating materials, including downloadable screensavers, are available at http://www.merce.org.
Cunningham died Sunday evening, in his sleep at his loft in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. He was 90 years old. He had been dancing most of his life, choreographing for more than 64 years, and directing a distinguished ensemble since 1953. All day on July 27th, New Yorkers whose lives have been touched, and often changed, by the brilliant dance-maker showed up at his downtown headquarters.Videos played quietly in a rear studio, while current and former company members, prepared for the inevitable but still not quite believing it had come, embraced all comers, and shared stories from the troupe’s life. Dozens of other choreographers, their professional lives kick-started by the rigor and vision they discovered in Cunningham’s classes, greeted friends and colleagues and testified to his impact on the culture of American dance.
On our first date, my future husband took me to a performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in a gymnasium at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The poster for the show (a big red, yellow and blue target), and the spare scenery (moveable posts connected by tapes, like the ones that herd you into lanes at airport security), were designed by artist Jasper Johns.
As near as I can recall, 40 years after the fact, this performance was an early “event”: a collage Cunningham put together of sections from his proscenium dances, often to different music than that which first accompanied them, staged specifically for a non-traditional space like a gym, a palace courtyard, or a platform on somebody’s lawn. I was swept off my feet. Forty years later I still love to watch the astonishingly focused Cunningham performers work their uninflected magic.
Cunningham, who won every award the dance world and foundations had to offer, emerged as a major figure in the international art world long before American audiences took him seriously.
Some critics call him the first post-modern choreographer; others say he was the only post-modern choreographer, and that everyone since has been merely post-Merce. His dancers are strong, fleet, upright; they combine the technical prowess required for ballet with modern’s more flexible spine, bare feet, and a creatureliness that transcends ballet’s customary romantic plots.
Rejecting utterly the passionate narrative style of Martha Graham, Cunningham made pieces whose only material was movement. He often drew concepts, and titles, from the scientific universe. Feelings might well up in a viewer, but provoking those feelings was not his intention.
The order of steps, of exits and entrances, of meetings and partings on the stage were often determined by chance procedures, like throwing the I Ching, methods Cunningham developed to undercut his own habits, to constantly generate innovative movement designs.The company performs not to music but with it: the choreographer was famous — some would say infamous — for pairing his dances with scores commissioned from avant-garde electronic composers. He’d ask for, say, 20 minutes of music. He’d then construct a 20-minute piece, measured with a stopwatch, often requiring the performers to move faster and faster to make the movement fit the time frame.
The dancers usually heard the music for the first time on opening night, when it would be played live on a bank of synthesizers or other electronic equipment, in the pit or at one side of the stage. For one piece musicians blew into conch shells; for another answering machine messages were broadcast. At last week’s Jacob’s Pillow concerts, composer John King, in the pit, played electronic distortions, poignantly bluesy, of chords rendered by a Dobro steel guitar, for a 1993 work called “CRWDSPCR.”
Cunningham’s final collaboration with John Cage, the 1994 “Ocean,” set the dancers in the middle of a circle, surrounded by the audience on bleachers, which in turn was surrounded by a symphony orchestra playing music by David Tudor and Andrew Culver. Huge clock faces visible to dancers, audience, and musicians alike helped us all keep our places in the 90-minute work.
Born in Centralia, Washington, in 1919, the young Mercier Cunningham, son of a lawyer, learned tap and ballroom dancing. After an abortive stint at university in Washington, D.C., he moved to Seattle and enrolled at the Cornish School, an arts academy where he encountered Graham dancer Bonnie Bird. Martha Graham herself, the mistress of modern dance who drew on serious themes — Greek tragedy, pioneer history, Native American ritual — met the tall young man at a summer program she taught at Mills College in Oakland, California in 1939, and invited him to become the second man in her company.
While performing with Graham, Cunningham studied ballet and met John Cage, one of the century’s most significant musical figures; the pair collaborated, in art and in life, until Cage’s death in 1992. Cage’s compositional and philosophical iconoclasm — and his Zen attitudes — deeply influenced Cunningham; his generosity provided the troupe with a Volkswagen bus for touring (won by answering quiz-show questions about mushrooms) and many gourmet meals on the road. (Cage also drove the bus.)
Other composers who contributed include Morton Feldman, David Behrman, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Gordon Mumma, and more recently Sonic Youth and Mikel Rouse. Similarly iconoclastic visual artists supported the company since its founding at Black Mountain College in 1953. Robert Rauschenberg designed and built costumes and sets, and often stage-managed performances. In 1968, Andy Warhol floated huge silver Mylar pillows in the air over a dance called “Rainforest.”Bruce Nauman, Frank Stella, and Robert Morris designed works in the first 20 years. More recently Cunningham collaborated with filmmakers like Charles Atlas and Elliot Caplan, making both “dance for camera” and brilliant documentaries. Distinguished alumni of the 56-year-old troupe include Steve Paxton, who went on to develop contact improvisation; Carolyn Brown, whose recent memoir Chance and Circumstance chronicles the company’s first 20 years; and Douglas Dunn, a quirky choreographer who continues to delight audiences.
Dancing at every performance until he turned 70, Cunningham, always reserved but friendly, then began to experiment with using computer programs to generate movement, finding new ways to rotate a limb or tilt a performer off-center. He was among the first to incorporate motion capture into his stage designs, in a glorious 1999 work called “Biped.” With a score by Gavin Bryars, the work used technology developed by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar to float images of the dancers in space. The piece had a profoundly elegiac quality.
Cunningham pioneered in the development of dance film, understanding the radical difference between the human eye and the camera lens, adapting his choreography for television while other artists still feared allowing their dances to be recorded. Some interesting pieces resulted from moving works originally made for film onto the stage.
For decades the Cunningham’s company has worked in the penthouse studio at Westbeth, the artists’ housing complex on the western edge of Greenwich Village, where its popular classes serve as an entry point for thousands of young dancers from all over the world. His works remain in the repertories of ballet companies, and will continue to be available, with the services of guest repetiteurs, even after the company concludes a final two-year tour and then disbands, a radical decision announced just a few weeks ago.
Cunningham recently published, with Aperture, Other Animals, a volume of the charming colored-pencil drawings of animals he made every morning to warm up his hands, his perception, and his imagination.Working from a wheelchair in his last years, he was still choreographing days before his death, telling company interviewer Nancy Dalva that, as with the deaf composer Beethoven, making dances had become a “habit of mind.”
*****
Cunningham’s current 13-member company performs free “events” this weekend, Saturday evening Aug. 1 at 6 and Sunday Aug. 2 at 2 and 6, at lower Manhattan’s Rockefeller Park. For further information, call 212-242-0800. Fascinating materials, including downloadable screensavers, are available at http://www.merce.org.
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