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MERCE CUNNINGHAM'S GENIUS

Amid all the drama surrounding Merce Cunningham's 90th birthday--a time of grand celebrations, awkward decisions and some nail-biting about his company when he's no longer there to guide it--it's been good to be reminded of just what makes this man so brilliant.

"There are certain limits as to what the body can do, but within the limits the variety is endless," he explains in this great little film on his official website. This fascination with movement for its own sake--without tethering it to the story of romantic swans or a tune's crescendo--is why Cunningham has done more than anyone to reinvent what it means to dance. For him, movement is meaningful because it's movement--the body in space, challenged and then glorious. Alice B. Toklas once said she liked his dancing "because it's so pagan."

"I think dance only comes alive when it gets awkward again", he once said, as recorded in this extensive 1968 profile by Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker. For Cunningham, movement is only interesting when pushed to the extremes, where flaws can creep in.

For someone who isn't terribly verbal when dealing with his own dancers (a friend who knows him personally decribes his speech as "Yoda-like"), Cunningham is beautifully expressive when explaining what motivates him. It's worth reading this interview Cunningham did with John Tusa of the BBC in which he describes the evolution of his ideas about dance, particularly when he and John Cage first began collaborating in the early 1940s. It was Cage who first suggested that Cunningham choreograph works in silence, rather than time the movement to music. This meant that it was only in performance that his work and Cage's soundscapes would come together, an effect that seemed especially disjointed and weird at the time (and which can still feel unsettling).

So there was a fairly tight structure, there were a certain number of milestones at that stage?

Yes. Yes. They were quite strict in one way but in between there was this incredible freedom. Because you didn't have to follow music, he didn't have to follow the dance. So when the elements got together they produced something that neither one of us alone could have imagined.
 

Early audiences hated what they were doing. Before the company's big breakthrough in London in 1964, a Paris audience threw things at the dancers ("their aim wasn't very good, so it was all right", Cunningham told Tusa). That his work now plays to sold-out auditoriums is a testament to his aesthetic courage and clarity of vision.

Seeing the man confined to a wheelchair is poignant. Time enriches most talents, but dancers (and athletes and beauties) must see theirs whittled away. Cunningham's decision to let his three most senior dancers go reinforces the distressing reality of a dancer's shelf-life.

Yet it is especially unsettling to know that Holley Farmer, the company's most senior female dancer, will no longer grace Cunningham's stage come June. With her shock of red hair and honed, flawless limbs, she has remarkable presence. In the recent premiere of "Nearly Ninety" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I found myself disappointed whenever there was an entrance that wasn't hers (which left me especially distressed in the second act). She brings such elegance and sophistication to whatever she does, it's hard to look away. (Farmer is perhaps best-known for a remarkable solo called "Loosetime", which can be seen in full in this film, about a fifth of the way in.)

Perhaps it is a personal bias that I presume dancers are inarticulate (shouldn't there be a price for such bodies?), but Farmer proves otherwise. In this moving interview with Gia Kourlis, she considers the weird bends of her late-starting career, and the wonders (and peculiar stresses) of working with Cunningham. I was particularly taken by this exchange, in which she describes what it's like to be dancing with the company while knowing her days are numbered:

I was wondering how it feels for you to be performing these dances right now.

Well, I think that I have had a very hard time dancing in front of Merce since this happened simply because I realize how vulnerable I am. Like an intimacy with someone after the relationship has broken off, it doesn’t feel safe. I’m very aware of not wanting to become distracted or injured, so in the studio I try to be focused to the point where I’m asking myself, “Okay, why am I doing this right now? I’m doing this because I’m going to be performing it soon and I need to be clear and I need to be strong when the performance comes.” So it’s the first time I’m not dancing for Merce’s eyes.

Her last performance will be in mid-May, when the company returns to Dia: Beacon, a space where they have performed some of their more innovative work in recent years. Cunningham will be there, still creating, still thriving on performance, the wizard behind it all.

~ EMILY BOBROW