OCEANOGRAPHY: Cunningham / Atlas

originally published in

Ocean (2010)

directed by Charles Atlas/ choreography by Merce Cunningham

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART | APRIL 11 – 15

“Could you make a dance in the round?” John Cage asked Merce Cunningham before the James Joyce/John Cage Festival in Zurich, in June 1991. Cage had in mind a dance performed in the middle of a circular space, surrounded by the audience and then musicians, in concentric circles. There being no suitable venue at the Swiss event, Cage’s idea was set aside, and a little more than a year later, he died, quite unexpectedly.

Photo credit: Cameron Wittig. Courtesy of Walker Art Center.

Cunningham, as ever persevering, finally realized their grand scheme in Brussels on May 18, 1994, at the vertiginous theater-in-the-round called the Cirque Royal. There, for the first time, 112 orchestra musicians played a complicated 2,403-page score, “Ocean 1-95,” by Andrew Culver, elaborating on Cage’s initial plans; at the same time, David Tudor introduced his live electronic soundscape, “Soundings: Ocean Diary,” comprised of eerily reprocessed underwater noise. Marsha Skinner’s sea-inspired leotards and filmy dresses painted the dancers in purples, turquoises, oranges, mauves, violets — the colors of the sun, the sky, the untroubled sea. The dance itself was an amazement: 90 teeming minutes of movement, perfectly without front, back, or sides.

The dance has since been revived thrice, most recently for a fantastic run in a setting for the Rainbow Granite Quarry in Minnesota, in 2008. There, Charles Atlas, Cunningham’s long time collaborator in filmmaking, captured the dance. Although you can’t see him in the film, the choreographer is there — just off the circle of the stage, near the ramp by which the second dancer in the piece enters, bundled in a winter coat and hat and scarf against the damp and bitter night air.

At the time of that revival, in July 2008, I asked Merce Cunningham about the process of making “Ocean,” in one of 19 interviews for the web series “Mondays with Merce.” Here are excerpts, never before published, from that discussion.

Nancy Dalva: Ocean took its title from Joyce, in a sense.

Merce Cunningham: Yes. I’ve forgotten when, but Joseph Campbell, the mythologist who was a friend of ours [Cunningham and John Cage], was talking once about Joyce, that he thought the next work Joyce would have done would have been about water—Ocean. That’s how it began. And John Cage began putting ideas about it with [the composer] Andrew Culver’s help into the computer. This would be a large work. We had both decided it could be 90 minutes, and we both liked the idea of not...no intermission, because I thought, well, that’s the length of movies and people don’t expect an intermission. So we could begin to think that way. And then there were, again from Joyce, I think it’s Ulysses that has 17 parts. Finnegan—the Wake—has 18. So we assumed that this could be 19. So in my choreographic scheme, I decided there would be 19 sections. That had nothing to do with the length of any given section, except the whole thing would be 90 minutes.

Dalva: How did you determine the length of the individual sections?

Cunningham: A great deal of it came up by chance. For Ocean I first thought to make 64 phrases, but I didn’t think that would be enough, so I made 128. Some of them are very short, some of them are long continuous phrases. Then the order I did again by using chance. So that often the length of the section was determined by how the phrasing came out. If it were a long phrase, it might take three minutes.

Working on Ocean was an absolutely extraordinary adventure. I came here [to the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio at Westbeth] on a Sunday. We were going to begin rehearsal that week. So I came and marked out—here by myself in this large studio—I marked out a circle. Then I thought, well, since I’m not in the circle yet, I—trying this out—would have to start off stage.

What was off stage? So I figured out—well, I’m practical, I put it at the back, and that was an entrance. Then I started the phrase that came into the circle—into the performing area—and stopped—

What’s front? It’s all front. So then I thought, well, if I use chance to determine—having come in—which way you face, how many space changes do you make…? So again, to aid in all this—or I thought it would—I divided this circle into a maximum of 12 possible spaces. Then again by chance I determined whether a phrase would stay in a given space or whether it would move from one to another. And in the course of all that, how many times did it turn, so to speak, front. Front was wherever you face.

Okay, well that you can see took a while, and it took me quite a while to figure out a way to translate this to the dancers because the whole thing was an adventure. But it was so fascinating to me the way something that I had always seen from one angle, now I was seeing it from three or four different angles.

Dalva: After the premiere in Brussels—just after the opening night party—you said to me, “Now all my dances look flat to me.”

Cunningham: Yes. With a proscenium space your focus is mainly front. Even though you can turn this way and that way [gestures with his hands], ordinarily, you see it mainly this way. Maybe this way. Maybe this way. How often do you see it from the back?

Dalva: It’s like trying to get through a canvas on a painting to see the other side.

Cunningham: Yep. But also the chance operation, using it that way made one shift constantly. For instance, the dancers were in one space facing this way. Then the next phrase having gone through the chance operation, you find three of them are going to be over there and one of them is going to be there. But when they get there, which way do they face? So that the thing was not always a reference constantly to one direction, but to this multiplicity of directions.

Dalva: There’s no bad seat in the house for Ocean.

Cunningham: Nobody has ever complained to me that they had a bad seat.

In his editing of the film he captured at the quarry, Charles Atlas has captured not an experience of seeing Ocean a single time, from a single seat, but the experience of seeing it many times, from various points of view; a notion of the work in its entirety. This was a last collaboration, because just as Cage died before the dance could be made, Cunningham died before the film was complete. Like Merce before him, Charles Atlas completed the work begun in tandem: a marvelous, monumental, and infinitely telling ending to their marvelous partnership.

 Photo credits: Cameron Wittig. Courtesy of Walker Art Center.
© Nancy Dalva 2008, 2012

The Legacy Tour: The Last "Sounddance"

 

In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sound-dance, and therinofter you're in the unbewised again....

                                                                                    James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

Chris Komar, Karole Armitage, Louise Burns, Rob Remley, and Merce Cunningham       photo Johan Elbers

"SOUNDDANCE" is Merce Cunningham's iconic work, and now, this week, it will be performed for the last time in a theater where it has been at home before, in the nation's capital. Here, once again, before our ears and in our ears, three arts—conceived separately and only converging in the theater--will combine, as if they were made for one another. The first is of course the dance; the second the decor (costumes and scenery) the third, the music. There is not, has not been, and won't ever be another Cunningham dance with a greater unity of impression than this one, the elements joining in a felicitous and exponential explosion.

You don't have to look far into this occasion to see that this last performance of this dance is ripe with metaphor. Next week, the company returns to New York, for performances at The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Then it's on to Paris. On Christmas Eve, the company will fly home to give its final performances--three last days at the Park Avenue Armory.  But in Washington, the very last month in the life of a company that began in 1953 starts with the piece that sums it all up. Everything is in this dance. It always was. And still, it expands to absorb current situation, current meaning, current thought. 

"Sounddance" is one of the very greatest of dances. It is as iconic as Nijinsky's "Sacre du Printemps," and shares its convulsive  musical and choreographic energies. It was first performed on March 8, 1975, in Detroit, Michigan, with Cunningham in the central role now danced by his sole successor in the part, Robert Swinston, his longtime assistant, and now the current Director of Choreography for The Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, with Robert Swinston at far right   photo: Tony Dougherty

Casts have come and gone in the piece, and there are echoes, and there are resonances. Chris Komar danced in the original and later revived it, the dance surging back to life as his own was winding down, destroyed by AIDS. At that revival's first performance, Cunningham came out on stage during the curtain calls with Komar at his side, and the two took a bow together, holding hands, both wearing suits. (Never before, such a joint bow, and never after.)

Charles Moulton, Chris Komar,  Brynar Mehl; Susana Hayman-Chaffey, above   photo:Jack Mitchell

You might think such history is lost as a work moves forward in time--and perhaps it will be, but it is not lost yet. Robert Swinston staged this revival with Meg Harper. They both danced with Komar, they both worked with him, they are both Cunningham technique pedagogues of the highest order. (Harper headed the Cunningham Dance Studio faculty; Swinston has trained generations of Cunningham dancers, and even now will teach a six o'clock beginners class and remain in the room afterwards, making dancers stronger, clearer, more secure, and more aware of themselves in space.) You don't have to know any of this to see the dance, of course, and I don't think about it--though sometimes it all comes to me unbidden-- mostly when I see it I am in it. 

BECAUSE that's where Merce Cunningham is. You can, in a sense, visit him in this dance. It is flesh of his flesh--he was still vividly performing and demonstrating when he made it--and born in a flash. He had just returned from Paris, where he staged "Un Jour ou Deux" on the Paris Opera Ballet, and home in his own studio, with his own company, he experienced a relief from the many exasperating exactions of working with the French. He spoke beautiful French, he was honored by the French, he is revered by the French, his company is received in Paris as nowhere else; but this does not preclude a certain impatience with regimentation and protocol. Cunningham had an abhorrence of what he called "fuss."  He did, after all, to use his words, like to "bust things open." Not only the conventions of the stage, but the conventions of making.

Here's how the dance proceeds:

The curtain goes up on a bare and silent stage--in the beginning is the void-- cloaked in black side curtains, with the ten vertical feet or so of Mark Lancaster's curtained drop gleaming at the back. The empty stage, and beyond, nothing. Or nothing knowable.  We see this for about ten seconds, and then the utterly fabulous percussive sound score by David Tudor kicks in, and keeps on kicking, with dense patterns of sound that are layered, like flocking on fabric, dense, rich, textured.

Out of the center of the backdrop spins a lone figure.  It is a significant role, and a rare one, for this dancer--first Cunningham, now Swinston--is a master of ceremonies. Still, you will perhaps have seen this figure in other Cunningham works: for instance  the wizard with- a -wand part the choreographer gave himself in "Signals."

     Merce Cunningham, Mel Wong, Valda Setterfield, Douglas Dunn            photo:© James Klosty (1970)

THE CHOREOGRAPHER, conjuring up his dancers, and his dance. This is--and there are works that can be read just the same way in the repertories of other choreographers--a dance about dance, and about dancing. About, among other things, beginning a dance company; and beginning a dance. 

It is also a dance that functions, as do so many of Cunningham's nature studies, on both the microscopic and the macrocosmic levels. Birth of the universe? Creation of heaven and then the peopling of the earth? Cells dividing and redividing?  For out from behind that curtain will ratchet  nine more people who will mate, conjoin, polymorphously generate life in the guise of more dancing; who will tilt against the air like salmon swimming upstream, with Swinston—in gestures I don't recall seeing in any other Cunningham work–-placing the dancers, shepherding them, and manipulating one of the women as if she were a doll. His is a position of power, and at a price: all the energy on the stage spills out from him.

 

 The stage teems with life, life, life--dancers caught up in  constant complex lifts, spins, shifts, re-groupings, convulsive couplings and triplings. It all feels fast, but if you watch "Sounddance" in silence, without the driving force of the score, you will see that there is slow within fast, and fast within slow. A rapid overall arc, with modulated phrasing within.

NEW ORBITS, new cells, and withal, some correspondences from the outer choreographic universe, the greater work of Merce Cunningham. Looking at it now, you can see where the dance came from, and where, in the sense of its echoes in later work--it went. For, as with any other great artist, you can look at Cunningham's works separately, or as one body. Here are elements known from other pieces. Small points of technical expression, like a flexed foot, as in starting a jig. (This is Joycean, after all.) And perhaps most central, that circle Cunningham sets forth like the circling dancers of Matisse he found so beautiful, but at times invoking something entirely else:

                                                                                                                         photo: Tony Dougherty

  A circle is something you can do....And the circle can be small or big or it can be circuitous. You even see it when you see animals surrounding a prey . It’s almost like a circle they make because they’ve come at this from different angles, and instead of it being aligned, where it starts here and goes this way, it does something where it completes itself. They don’t do it because they’re making a circle. They’re doing it to attack this situation. And I think a circle has a closed effect. You’re surrounding something so that it’s like---Well, you can  say it’s a lot of things. It might be people attacking something, for example.                                                                            Merce Cunningham for "Mondays with Merce"       

       

AT ITS END, the dance winds itself back, and one after another, the dancers are sucked--or ushered--back into the void from which they emerged. A lifetime that passes in 17 minutes.  Then applause roars forth, and people surge to their feet, for "Sounddance" is an efficient and exciting energy transfer device. (It fills you up, and you send it back.) They applaud the dancers, the musicians.  And of course, they applauded the choreographer. This was the last dance performed in his lifetime, on the very day he died. The company danced at Jacob's Pillow in the afternoon, and in the evening, as thunder cracked open the sky, he took his last breath.


At his last  "Sounddance" in Washington, Cunningham stayed in the wings, timing the dance with his stop watch as usual, and watching it with his eagle eye. This was during a period when he had retreated from curtain calls, being too wobbly to walk onstage securely. Later--starting at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth--he began to take bows  from his wheelchair. It wasn't the way he liked to appear, but it was practical and courteous--two of his signal characteristics.  Perhaps, also, it was simply the renewal of a pleasure he had so long enjoyed--being onstage.

Merce Cunningham and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company                     Hanover, New Hampshire (2007)

But back then, he remained backstage. As the Kennedy Center audience cheered, his company took two brief curtain calls, and the lights  came with the house still in tumult. "Where's Merce?" someone asked. 

It's a question I have been asking people since he died, in interview after interview: Where is Merce for you now? There have been many answers, some entirely surprising. But it seems clear, if you think about it on his own terms.  

Nancy Dalva: One of the things I learned from "Enter" is that an exit is also an entrance, and that when you're leaving something you're also going someplace.

Merce Cunningham: You're going to something else. Yes.

AND YET he remains in his work. You can visit him in it, for now. In one our our nineteen interviews for Mondays with Merce ,  Cunningham said, "You can make up a narrative. I don't object if someone comes up with a story."

But I don't have to make this up: "Sounddance" will end, and the world will go dark for a time.

As Valda Setterfield said to me after his death, "Merce was the sun."

Valda Setterfield in the Merce Cunningham Studio at Westbeth, for "Mondays with Merce"

NANCY DALVA IS THE MERCE CUNNINGHAM TRUST SCHOLAR IN RESIDENCE 
All quotations from "Mondays with Merce" ©Nancy Dalva
Photograph of "Signals" courtesy of and copyright  ©James Klosty
All other photographs courtesy of The Merce Cunningham Trust
Parts of this essay were first published by Alexandra Tomalonis in "DanceViewTimes."

©Nancy Dalva 2011. 2012