REMEMBERING MERCE

It would be hard to overestimate Merce Cunningham's contribution to the world of dance. As a choreographer he spent a lifetime revolutionising the form and frustrating expectations, designing remarkable, challenging movement up until the very end. He died late on July 26th, aged 90, having choreographed an evening-length piece to celebrate his own 90th birthday earlier this year.

At an event in June to announce the company's Legacy Campaign, a smart and precedent-setting plan for preserving Cunningham's work and supporting his company, I ended up talking to a few of his dancers. We were milling about the Bethune Street studio in New York's West Village and I was quietly marvelling at how mortal they all seemed in their civvies. Having seen them perform--most recently at the final and wonderful Dia "Beacon Event" in May--I knew their trousers and summertime shifts concealed instruments capable of spectacular feats of balance, strength and concentration. Rashaun Mitchell, an especially dazzling member of the troupe who has been with Cunningham since 2004, described what makes dancing for him so unique. "You can just keep trying his moves for years," he explained, addressing Cunningham's aggressive demands on the body. "You may break yourself, but there is always something more difficult to try."

Mitchell, together with Marcie Munnerlyn, who also joined the dance company in 2004, considered the pressure of time on dancers. Although Cunningham himself danced on stage well into old age (he even performed a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov when he was 80, albeit while holding on to a barre, according to Alistair McCauley in his must-read obituary), dancers must reckon with time’s steady erosion of their physical gifts. The window for performers is narrow and precious, and Cunningham's choreography, with its unconventional intensity (movement is divorced from narrative and arranged separately from music), trains dancers to approach the discipline in a singular way.

"I'm hitting my stride now," Mitchell said, more reflective--even wistful--than boastful (he is 30). “At times I wonder what it would be like to dance with music.” But Cunningham's choreography makes sense to him. At any rate, he was alarmed to discover that a recent audition for the Batsheva Dance Company was limited to dancers under the age of 25.

What happens now? The plan is for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to begin a final two-year international tour and then shut down. Dancers will each receive a year's salary as severance, as well as extra funds to help in any career transition, and the Merce Cunningham Trust will take control of the dances for licensing purposes (the foundation is still raising money for all of this). As for Cunningham himself, he is best remembered in motion.