A JOHN CAGE BIRTHDAY ALBUM

ON JOHN CAGE'S BIRTHDAY

THE WAY OF MERCE

"Chance is the dogma, but look deeper."

                                      Carolyn Brown

"If the dancer dances, everything is there. The meaning is there if that's what you want."

                                       Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham with composer Gordon Mumma in St. Paul de Vence, 1966            

STARTING more than  seventy years ago, Merce Cunningham began to change the way people dance and the people see dancing in the same way that Picasso and the cubists changed the way people painted and the way people see painting.

He took dance apart and put it back together again, leaving out all but the most essential. He stripped dance of conventional narrative; he ordered it by chance procedures he conceived it without music and without decor. He took it out of the proscenium (but later put it back) and exploded the stage picture into fragments. He made the viewer the auteur. The great irony inherent in all this is that only a great storyteller possessed of extraordinary musicality could have stripped away so much and be left with more. Cunningham was able to separate dance from its traditional trappings not because dance does not need them, but because dance--at least in his hands--already had them.

There has been a lot said and written about Merce Cunningham and John Cage and their working method--most of it said by neither of them. But of all of the odd things people have thought about Cunningham's dances over the years, the oddest--including the notion that the dances are in part or whole improvisational (which of course they are not)--have arisen from his use of chance, the most confusing element of the Cage-Cunningham dogma. To some, its use seems flaky. To others, it implies a certain haphazardness, the evidence of the dances themselves notwithstanding.

Cunningham used chance, in some form, at some point (but not necessarily the same point) or points in the making of every dance. While the habit may have originally been inspired by Cage and Marcel Duchamp--friend to both Cage and Cunningham, and Cage's chess partner--two reasons (other than a playful disposition)  for its continuance suggest themselves. First, that Cunningham either did not like to make or at times could not easily make choices, though that is speculation; second, that Cunningham was intentionally--if at times quite minimally--depersonalizing his work in order to open it out to the individual viewer. In retrospect, one can see the choreography getting himself out of his own way, to allow for possibilities he had not encountered before, and to keep himself interested and challenged, with ever new puzzles to solve. Still, his work indelibly bears his signature, and conveys his cast of mind, and temperament.

IN MERCE'S WORDS

REMEMBERING JOHN CAGE
(from interviews for "Mondays with Merce")

 with photography from James Klosty

   

At the piano at Westbeth

He was a man with a mind which was constantly alert to almost everything around him. Very--sharp tongued is wrong--but very bright. He worked constantly....Constantly composing or doing art work or answering letters, or writing books. It was simply what he did. And he may have said things that sounded as though he didn't do anything, but he was constantly at something. Patient? Not entirely. No.

Playing chess in Belgrade, 1972

 Mostly he was, I guess, patient--patiently he would listen to people--and make some remarks. Sometimes those were very funny. He liked talking with people who were interesting. It didn't make any difference whether they were osteopaths or whatever, it didn't make a difference. If it's someone who had an interesting mind, he'd want to know what that person's mind was like. I think he was just open, wasn't so much learning as absorbing.

Rehearsal at Westbeth in 1971

His mind was so bright it could hop from one thing to another, and in great detail. And he could take something which was unfamiliar and look at it or listen to it, or both, or whatever, and discern something about it that nobody else perhaps had even ever figured out.

Rehearsing Cunningham's "Second Hand" at Westbeth in 1972, Carolyn Brown and Merce Cunningham dancing

I remember  after one rehearsal  John Cage saying to one of these piano teachers, "Now you're playing everything absolutely perfect. Just go a little further and make a few mistakes." It was like some kind of eye opener. One had thought that one should do one's technique perfectly--the idea of perfection. And it isn't that he didn't want us to play the notes correctly. Just go a little further.  Risk! 

At the Merce Cunningham Studio in Westbeth

A very good memory, and because of the wideness of his mind, of his thinking, he absorbed things in ways that opened them out into other directions. He was bright, no doubt incredibly bright.

Touring in France

And funny, you know, marvelously funny.

Photos kind courtesy and copyright ©James Klosty, with thanks for this collaboration.

Text from the transcripts of "Mondays with Merce," ©Nancy Dalva, 2008, 2009, 2014

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

"DANCE IS A VISUAL ART"

              --MERCE CUNNINGHAM

                                     

PARIS--

AT THE BEAUBOURG

Robert Rauschenberg: Express 

IN THIS grey scale canvas we see images surrounding the dancers of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Images of what? Racehorses with jockeys; men rappelling down a cliff; some harmonious and beautiful naked bodies; something that looks like a an underwater creature or perhaps the human brain; a city on the water, with piers reaching out from the shores; and to the lower right, an end to war: Grant and Lee at the conclusion of the Civil War that rent the United States. E pluribus unum. In the equilibrium of the canvas, these disparate items are unified as the product  of an original mind. A singular mind.

You can see the images as an assemblage of unlike elements co-existing,  and you can see the dancers among them representing  beauty--and grace itself. Tilting at gravity, they embody the ability to fly through the air under one's own power. 

Or, you can see  the dancers apart--find them to be a beautiful refuge, as art can be, from the world and its various clamors. They draw your eye, and into the canvas you fall, and all the rest is left behind. Outside. You're in here. Inside the painting, or inside the dance.

Paul Cézanne  The Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) 1906, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

AT THE MUSÉE DU LUXEMBOURG
Paul Cézanne :The Bathers 

MATISSE owned this painting for nearly forty years. You can stand, or walk about and look at it from different angles, perhaps kneel down to look up, as one might from a nearby chair: You can do this and you can see what Matisse saw. You can dwell where he dwelled, inside this painting, of which he wrote when donating it to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris:

In the thirty-seven years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, though not entirely I hope: it has sustained me morally in the critical venture of my moments as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and perseverance. "  Henri Matisse

Severity, formality, an even-minded treatment of space; not a point of view but points of view within a single work; a breaking out of the frame; an ever more complex technique; endless variety within given limitations; the natural world as subject; freedom allied with rigor, structure, line, volume; an absence of anecdote-- the work of art as its own subject. They established the ground on which those who follow would stand.

Paul Cézanne on painting: "La peinture est ce qui me vaux le mieux."

Merce Cunningham on dancing: "It's what's interested me all my life."

Merce Cunningham in "How to Pass, Fall, Kick and Run" with John Cage to the right   

AT THE THÉÂTRE DE LA VILLE

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company 

TONIGHT at 8:30 p.m., the curtain will go up on the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for the last time. Next week, they will close their fantastic run (since 1953) with a series of performances in the vast space of the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, but here, tonight, is the last of the repertory performances.

I have been looking at--and living inside--this work for just about the same number of years in which Matisse looked at his painting by Cézanne. The very first dance I saw is the one in the photograph above. Then I went back to my proper girls school in New Jersey, to a world of drab gym uniforms, Latin class, and an honor code that encouraged snitching. 

In the years to come, I would enter and re-enter this world in the theater--this world of Merce Cunningham--and  visit and re-visit it in my mind. And go back. To the theater, to the thinking. If it rained into a lake, it reminded me of Merce.

In the years since that first encounter with the champagne that was "How To," I have met most of that cast--Carolyn Brown, Sandra Neels, Gus Solomons, Valda Setterfield. And the casts that came after. The storytellers, too: John Cage, David Vaughan.
What an amazement...!

And for the last four years I have had the adventure of watching the company at work, and capturing what I could of them--and of Merce himself--on film. That has been wonderful. But it is, it was, that work itself that filled up my eyes, gave my mind something to occupy it, to wander in.

What a luxury it has been, to live inside that art. And what a necessity. A refuge for the mind. A place to dwell amidst the traffic of the ways.I can't imagine what my life would have been without it. Or how it would have been....

Once, in a raucously decorated salon behind the stage at the Palais Garnier, the composer-musician David Tudor introduced me to Teeny Duchamp, Marcel's widow.  What's to say about that, to have passed through the work and back into life--that life?

It's been raining in Paris the whole time I've been here. Rain, tears, what's the difference?

Water, water, water.

Cadaqués, Spain  1970          Merce Cunningham snorkeling                             ©James Klosty

   

Special thanks to James Klosty

©Nancy Dalva

MERCE CUNNINGHAM /bio

published in

MERCE CUNNINGHAM

Merce Cunningham stood at the nexus of classicism and modernism the way Russian-born choreographer Michel Fokine stood at the nexus of classicism and romanticism. Cunningham stripped his choreographic process of all but the essential element of movement, excluding decor, narrative, music—anything decorative or extrinsic. These were later added back, their invention left to others—including John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns—without much, if any, collusion. All but an early few of his 150 works were made in silence. The independence—indeed the primacy—of choreography thus established, Cunningham next began to break down movement into increasingly small increments and began to divide up the body as well. To the lower-body positions of ballet, he added a flexible and dynamic torso; later, he would choreograph for the arms without regard to the lower body, giving them “facings” and directions all their own. The same, too, for the head.

Merce Cunningham at 498 3rd Ave, November 1970                                          Photo credit: James Klosty

Meanwhile, he broke dance out of the proscenium and began to assemble and reassemble his dances without regard to a “front,” fracturing and refracting the stage picture in the way that Cubists broke up the visual plane of a painting. This fragmentation mirrors the breakdown of syntax and the concurrent notions of simultaneity and multiplicity of associations that arose in modernist literature, and in computer coding the breakdown of information into digital bytes. Cunningham was also an early adopter of new technologies, including video and computer programming. All along, his use of chance procedures at some point or points in the making of every piece was a way to remove some of the effects of personal choice and habit and willful control, and can be viewed as a kind of personal Taoism.

Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington in 1919, one of three sons of a lawyer father and a gadabout mother. He first studied dance with the vaudevillian Maud Barrett, then studied modern dance at Seattle’s Cornish School, where he met Cage; in 1939, at the Bennington School of the Dance at Mills College in Oakland, California, he met Martha Graham, whom he followed to New York. In the summer of 1953, while in residence at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which remained his focus for the rest of his life. Two weeks before he died in July 2009 at age 90, he was in his studio with his dancers, working on something new.

NANCY DALVA IS THE MERCE CUNNINGHAM TRUST SCHOLAR IN RESIDENCE
©Nancy Dalva 2011 
www.nancydalva.com
photo  ©James Klosty
published in The Brooklyn Rail with the kind permission of The Brooklyn Academy of Music, which published this piece in slightly different form in SIDEBAR FROM BAM: The Complete Works

DUCHAMP, CAGE, JOHNS: BUFFALO, 1968, "WALKAROUND TIME"

LOOKING AT THE SET FOR MERCE CUNNINGHAM'S "WALKROUND TIME" 

            RICHARD HAMILTON, JOHN CAGE, TEENY DUCHAMP, MARCEL DUCHAMP (SMOKING).
            IN THE BACKGROUND, JASPER JOHNS.

           ©JAMES KLOSTY

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

ON JOHN CAGE'S BIRTHDAY, A PHOTO FROM JAMES KLOSTY

                                                         AT WESTBETH , SPRING 1972

BLISSFULLY FUNNY

OCEANOGRAPHY

On Monday night, the New York premiere--it has only been seen, once, in Minneapolis--of Charles Atlas's film of "Ocean," at the "Mondays with Merce" series at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. This most epic of Merce's dances can be seen as many ways  as there are viewers in the room--or in the quarry where it was last performed, and where Atlas and his team traveled for this last collaboration between the choreographer and his longtime filmmaker. In anticipation, I am posting this piece (with cast update at the end) published at the time of the last New York performances of "Ocean," at the Rose Theater. "Ocean" is epic both in form (you can "read" it as a long poem) and in its qualities. It is a majestic work, a grand work. To my eye, it recounts Merce Cunningham's long relationship with John Cage, and recounts, in the structure of its series of duets, the many ways in which long time partners can relate to each other, and to the world. It is also a marvel of simultaneity and multiple foci---a work totally in the round, and totally wonderfully satisfactory no matter where on the circumference you yourself sit--and I've tried to sit everywhere, or as everywhere as one can, over time.  I once said to Merce that there wasn't a bad seat in the house, and he replied, instantly,   "So far no one has complained." Tomorrow, our seats--that is, our joint vantage point--will be selected by Atlas. You couldn't ask for a more trustworthy auteur--he has carried on this work without Merce just as he himself carried on the notion for this dance--which was John Cage's--without Cage. He will introduce the film, preceded by a brief clip of Merce himself on "Ocean"  from the "Mondays with Merce" Film Library. 

"Ocean"
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Rose Theater
The Lincoln Center Festival
New York City
July 12-16, 2005

Prologue

"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. He 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. Cunningham went on to make dances that seemed to subsume Cage's death—among them "Doubtletoss" and "Enter"–and to carry forward his notion, moving, as in "Breakers," ever closer to the sea. Cage's grand concept was first fully realized 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; and 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 a dance perfectly without front, back, or sides. It contained (about 26 minutes from the start) a figure–dancers in a circle, arms linked, variously balanced—from the very center of a Cunningham work called "Beachbirds," made in 1991. Also carried forward, though subtle means of casting and configurations, were threads from his other Joycean epic made with Cage, "Roaratorio," which itself had since been echoed in "Enter."

With its slow beginning and convulsive ending–from nothing to everything and back to nothing—"Ocean" also recalled that other Cunningham tour de force with a Joycean title, "Sounddance." ("In the beginning, was the sounddance.") Both were creation myths. And both, despite the separate conception of score, decor, and dance, had a marvelous unity of impression.

The Voyage Out

Right after that opening night performance, Cunningham said to me, "Now all my dances look flat to me." His next dance, "Ground Level Overlay," premiered in 1995, recreated many of the multi-directional effects of "Ocean" on a proscenium stage, and one might have expected him to go on in this rich vein. Instead, having mastered the problems inherent in these two complex works, Cunningham moved on to still a different way of working—other complexities, other challenges—making a series of works that looked like channel zapping, with concomitant, and near-impossible, refinements to his technique, which now required getting from "here" to "there" without the "to."

"Ocean," meanwhile, circled the globe: to La Fenice in Venice, which burned down right after; to Japan; to the first Lincoln Center Festival in 1996, where it had a fantastic run in a specially built theater in Damrosch Park. In all, there were eight productions, and then it was gone.

In the intervening years, parts of the dance have been seen in Cunningham's "Events, " which are intermission-less concerts made up of excerpts from the repertory and newly made material. The original cast, but two, retired from the company. And sadly, Chris Komar, Cunningham's assistant at the time "Ocean" was made, died, and so, later on, did David Tudor.

The Return

In 1992, Robert Swinston, a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for twelve years, became the assistant to the choreographer, and began work on meticulous archival constructions of works that had fallen out of performance. Jeannie Steele, who had joined the company just the year before "Ocean" and danced on to become the senior female in the troupe, in June 2001 was appointed rehearsal director. They are the only members of the original cast of "Ocean" still dancing, and it fell to them to bring back the dance, so that the choreographer could recalibrate his intricate epic.

The only change in scheme was an adjustment in number. Matthew Mohr joined the company while the work was being made, and in consequence had a small role. So also did China Laudisio, who traveled through sections of the dance paired with Emma Diamond, and appeared in group sections but had no significant duet or solo tasks. Their two small parts are now combined into one, danced by Daniel Roberts. This has the salutary effect of giving the beauteous Lisa Boudreau (in Diamond's part) a cavalier during a wonderful section of the work in which she travels on a journey through two twined configurations of dancers, as if through a maze. (There are two other such moments in the dance when, in a kind of story-theater effect, some dancers become scenery. There is the circle of men so like the circle in "Beachbirds," though which Boudreau will weave her way, followed by three other women. And there is a pergola made by raising Jennifer Goggans up high and flat in the air, like a lovely roof, where again dancers weave in and out, like goldfish in and out of a miniature castle.)

Some of the originals were in the house for the New York performances, seeing for the first time the piece they had made with Cunningham more than ten years ago. This was a significant revival, with the current company taking on, all at once, singular solos and highly charged duets created by singular and high charged performers. The shapes are the same, the steps are the same, but what you might call the fragrance is different, because the chemistry is different.

Ocean's 14

Here is how the casting falls out (proceeding alphabetically), first cast to revival:

Kimberly Bartosik–Jennifer Goggans
Thomas Caley–Jonah Bokaer
Michael Cole–Cédric Andrieux
Emma Diamond–Lisa Boudreau
Jean Freebury–Holly Farmer
Frédéric Gafner–Daniel Squire
China Laudisio–Daniel Roberts
Matthew Mohr–Daniel Roberts
Banu Ogan–Andrea Weber
Jared Philips– Koji Mizuta
Glen Rumsay–Rashaun Mitchell
Jeannie Steele
Robert Swinston
Cheryl Therrien–Marcie Munnerlyn
Jenifer Weaver–Julie Cunningham

Cunningham, of course, did this casting, and it is exceedingly strong. In some cases, the current dancer bears some physical resemblance to the original, as with Munnerlyn and Therrien. In others, they are nothing like. Throughout, the originals are proclaimed by their successors, as when Bokaer echoes, on his very different body, Caley's plush plié and remarkable relevé. The greatest change is not in a solo, where you might expect to find it, nor in any of duets, where the personal dynamics are so altered, but in two group sections (one at about 27 minutes into the dance , the next at about 56 minutes), where women are joined by a single man. In 1994, this was Jared Angle, a blonde, curly-haired, cherub. With him, the women looked like goddesses playing with Ganymede, their cup-bearer. With the virtuoso very grown-up Koji Mizuta in the role, the women look like his harem, or a bevy of sirens, sent to sing him to his ruin.

Love Makes the World Go Round

There are four dedicated couples in "Ocean:" Munnerlyn and Mitchell, Goggans and Squire, Steele and Bokaer, and Weber and Andrieux, with the rest of the cast rather more fickle. Swinston, in particular, plays the ladies man, gallantly tending to Boudreau and then the tempering the firebrand Farmer with grim resolve. Steele, meanwhile, still scampers like a girl, touchingly escorted by her serious young swain Bokaer, whom she charms with smiles. Munnerlyn and Mitchell are complimentary angularities (the originals were more contrasted, he being attenuated and she remarkably fluid). The other two pairs are so ardent you can feel their every touch. Goggans is a natural soubrette, but rises to the drama occasioned by the exceptional focus and attack Squire brings to this role, and indeed all his roles. And Andrieux! Not only does he rule the men's section like Poseidon, he turns what was (with Cole and Ogan) a kind of temple sculpture come-to-life episode into a French film. And a hot one.

Much to the credit of this revival, each of these duets has a different movement character, which is consistent from the first production, quite apart from the casting. You can, if you want to, read them as a Cunningham primer on partnership in dance, or, if you will, in life. A couple can mirror each other, a couple can follow one another, one partner can pursue another, and one partner can seduce the other, a couple can get all mixed up with each other so you can hardly tell them apart, or a couple can proceed though life in parallel, facing everything together, side by side.

What Goes Around....

"Ocean" is made up of some 128 phrases, and choreographed using chance procedures to determine facings, numbers of dancers on stage at given times, and the timings of entrances and exits, but these compositional devices having no bearing on the experience of seeing it. What does determine what you see is where you sit on the 360 degree front of the piece. But while in Damrosch Park there was a sense of foreground and background—what was in front of you felt immediate, and what was across seemed to be happening on the other side of the world; the Rose Theater was wonderfully intimate. There was a great sense of simultaneity and complexity. The excellent acoustics enhanced this effect, submerging the viewer in a sonar bath.

Perhaps the most complex parts of "Ocean" are the tricky large group sections; a swathe of these transpire at about 65 minutes into the piece, when there is a great sweep of group movement. From upstairs–and up is the place from which to see this work, if you can—there is a section where, as trios surround single frozen figures and animate them, you feel as if a spiral staircase were swirling in front of you, with all the figures on it moving down. By then your eye has accustomed itself to the language of this dance, which Cunningham lays out at the open, with two solos.

"Ocean" begins with Daniel Squire performing a phrase—almost like an alphabet, or a vocabulary—in varying directions, so that you see him do the same thing first from one angle, and then from another. He exits, and Julie Cunningham—a pristine technician with perfect placement—comes in and gives the feminine version of the text. You see this and you of course move on with the dance, but the choreographer will bring you back here later, restating their themes. Some 70-odd minutes into the piece, several of the women in turn are lifted by three men, and put down again facing different directions, as if they were sculpture and their porters (Bokaer, Mitchell, Roberts, a frequent trio throughout) were art movers. One of these is Julie Cunningham. Then at about 78 minutes, Squire returns with three women, but they do not carry him. Rather, he moves from position to position—stepping out in huge "rondes de jambe," or outward circles of the leg, tracing giant curves on the floor. When he pauses, the women support him (he assumes a different statuesque pose at each of ten points on the stage) and are at the same time supported. Somewhere in the sequence, he transforms into Apollo, and they into the Muses, and then the notion vanishes. But the allusion is there, if you want it to be, as is any other meaning you want to find.

Full Circle

The technique that binds "Ocean" into a whole is the use of recurrence and repetition of what we might call visual "rhyme." For instance, take a phrase performed by Jonah Bokaer. He commands the stage at the time, about 26 minutes into the piece, moving in a fast circling outward with one leg moving like a propeller. This is performed again near the end of the piece by two women, as part of a complex group section where it catches your eye by chance. This sort of thing happens throughout. A phrase or figure is often clearly and quite ravishingly repeated—as when Jeannie Steele is lifted, at 62 minutes, in different directions, so that she seems to be sailing around the stage. But also, a phrase can be echoed almost subliminally. So: the same phase, different dancer, different direction, different configuration on stage. This effects what in a poem would be feminine rhyme, or slant rhyme. A rhyme that's slightly off, but there. In this manner, Cunningham casts his net, elastic and strong.

For all the circularity of "Ocean"—there's one giddy moment when Robert Swinston spins like a top in order to move—the most magical of its directions is up. Up, up. Above the work—in Brussels it was rigged to rise over the piece as the dance began—is a white mesh disk. It could be the top of a tent, it could be the sky, it can be whatever you want it to be. To me, it seems like a veil. Something we cannot see through, or beyond. There is light behind it, so that when the dancers look up, as they often do throughout the piece, they are illuminated. As a practicality, their gesturing up includes those in the upper tiers of the theater in their activities. As a metaphor, they may be saluting something, or someone, up above us, in the boundless aether.

Epilogue

Not that Cunningham would suggest that—something metaphorical. But neither would he mind it. Just like all of his work, "Ocean" is different for each viewer. As usual, the choreographer encourages individual interpretation by avoiding conventional story-telling, instead making movement drama via off-kilter trios, plush duets, intense solos, teeming group sections; and also by contrasting types of movement. Allegro and largo. Largo within allegro, allegro within largo. Stillness contrasted with steppiness; heaviness contrasted with lightness. Trios carried across personnel, so that a series of dancers performs one long phrase. Morphing groups, so that a quintet becomes five solos, or a trio and two solos, catching you up in the inconstant, changing relationships. But here, in this dance, in "Ocean," the physical set up—the audience seated in the round, and the choreography made so that every point on its 360 degrees is the front—enhances what you might call the psychic set up. What seems to be arriving to you seems to be leaving to me. (In this way a Cunningham dance, and this one especially, is a lot like life.)

You might have experienced "Ocean" as an episodic adventure along the lines of the "Odyssey," or perhaps as a romance, with each duet its own love story. Or yours may have been a more contemplative perspective, with the dance viewed as seascape, or moving sculpture. Your particular lens may be microcosmic, so that the tricky fugue sections looked like step dancers on a village green; or it may be macrocosmic, so that these figurations appeared as constellations—just what you would see if, one starry night at sea, you gazed up at the sky. Whatever you saw in the dance, every night of this past week, you could see (unless you were in the balcony above him, sharing his perspective) Merce Cunningham, seated in the first tier of seats, watching his dance from the audience. The maker, out among us, sharing his vision. He sees and shows us the world without preconceptions, but with a clear mind, a constant curiosity and an open heart.

Note: for those interested in dance lineage, the roles in the film (first cast to film cast) are as follows--Andra Weber was unfortunately injured at the time, and does not appear, but her role is "covered" in most cases (the full company sections are one dancer short) with Emma Desjardins and Brandon Collwes dancing the duet first danced by Banu Ogan and Michael Cole, then  Weber with Cedric Andrieux.  Robert Swinston is hence the only original cast member in the work. 

Kimberly Bartosik–Jennifer Goggans
Thomas Caley–Jonah Bokaer-Silas Riener
Michael Cole–Cédric Andrieux-Daniel Madoff
Emma Diamond–Lisa Boudreau-Melissa Toogood
Jean Freebury–Holly Farmer
Frédéric Gafner–Daniel Squire
China Laudisio–Daniel Roberts-Brandon Collews
Matthew Mohr–Daniel Roberts-Brandon Collwes
Banu Ogan–Andrea Weber-NOT IN FILM
Jared Philips– Koji Mizuta
Glen Rumsay–Rashaun Mitchell
Jeannie Steele-Emma Desjardins
Robert Swinston
Cheryl Therrien–Marcie Munnerlyn
Jenifer Weaver–Julie Cunningham

Photos (all by Stephanie Berger):
First:  The company in "Ocean."
Second:  Rashaun Mitchell and Marcie Munnerlyn perform "Ocean"
Third:  Cedric Andrieux and Jeannie Steele perform "Ocean"
Fourth: Daniel Squire arm up, with three women: Jennifer Goggans on left, Holly Farmer partially visible, Jeannie Steele

Volume 3, No. 27
July 18, 2005
copyright ©2005, 2010 Nancy Dalva