Merce Cunningham

Dressed in a sedate grey, pinstriped suit, with an open-collared shirt and Risky Business Ray-Ban sunglasses, the white-haired, iconoclastic dance-maker was attended by a statuesque woman dressed in a white nurse’s uniform who swanned Cunningham’s wheelchair to the front of the room. Now arthritic, and thus unable to remain standing for long or to walk with ease, Cunningham remains chipper of spirit. Looking like some elder statesman of a leprechaun, Cunningham took his place as the gathering’s center of attention with easy aplomb.

Of course, he was greeted with applause from the audience. One longtime follower of his career, who travels near and far to see his company, assured me the shades were familiar, and even necessary, in places like France, where the dancemaker has long been popular with a part of the French public as a visionary innovator, and where he’s often set upon in airports, and other places, as a celebrity.

Elliott Forrest, something of a fixture in New York’s culture chat circuit, provided the hour-long session with a modicum of interviewer’s questions as Cunningham shot the breeze about his career, nearly 50 years long as a dancer, with more than 60 years’ longevity as a choreographer. For all the theorizing that often surrounds Cunningham and his nontraditional work–some of it highfalutin and opaque in the ways of gobbledegook artspeak and “dance theory” writing–the man himself remains soothingly plain-spoken and straightforward.

The purpose of his presence at this year’s festival was to oversee the presentation of Ocean, the 1994, 90-minute, 14-dancer work that began life as the brainchild of John Cage, Cunningham’s longtime artistic collaborator and, until his death in 1992, life-partner. Cage had, in Cunningham’s telling, the germ of an idea to present a water-inspired dance in the round, literally on a circular performing area, with an audience seated around the perimeter of the circular stage and a ring of musicians seated around the public. Apparently his inspiration came from James Joyce and the assertion by Joseph Campbell that if Joyce had lived to write another work, it would have been about water and the ocean.

Cunningham and company have previously been part of Lincoln Center Festival, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. In fact, Ocean was first given in the New York area under the festival’s auspices during its inaugural year in 1996. At that time it was shown in the Center’s open-air, outdoor venue in Damrosch Park. This time, it was presented indoors, in Rose Theater of Frederick P. Rose Hall, the center’s fairly new jazz theater complex.

With nearly 200 works to Cunningham’s credit so far–including a number of specially arranged, or composed, works for camera on film and video–Ocean represents a drop in the bucket, so to speak, when looking at the choreographer’s full catalogue of dances. Still, it was this particular work that the choreographer himself chose to be performed at Lincoln Center Festival when he was invited to participate again this year. Whether or not the grandly scaled work ranks high in the estimation of Cunningham’s public as a favorite, or a masterpiece of its kind, becomes a matter of opinion and choice.

Critic Arlene Croce once said that her favorite Balanchine ballet was the one being shown at the moment. Cunningham’s output has been consistently original and remarkable enough for me to borrow Croce’s suggestion, and feel comfortable applying it to Cunningham.

To my eyes, however, after watching and mostly marveling at Cunningham’s dances since 1970, Ocean stands somewhere beneath the top of my list of highlights. Though Cunningham notes the choreography took him six months to create, and, to be sure, the finished result possesses undeniably grand scale (112 musicians ring the audience ringing the dance floor) and ambitious scope–entrances for the 90-minute dance intended to steer clear of an expected, frontal point of view all happen by way of what amount to the four points of a compass–I find the artful activity yielding less pleasure visually and theatrically than I’ve come to expect from Cunningham creations at their finest.

Chatting at the symposium about his way of working and creating dances over the years, Cunningham, who dates his personal choreographic career from a 1944 performance given as a dual concert with music by Cage, noted Cage’s description of their working relationship: “Merce does his thing; I do mine. And, for your convenience, we put it together.” (In a similar vein, when once pressed to spell out in personal terms the two men’s relationship offstage over the years, Cunningham stated: “Well, John does the cooking and I do the dishes.”)

Cunningham met Cage, who was seven years older, when the musician served as the 20-year-old dancer’s music teacher in 1939 at the Cornish School (now the Cornish Institute of Allied Arts) in Seattle. Experimentation was long Cage’s area of interest, and when the two both ended up in New York, where Cunningham had moved to dance with Martha Graham, they soon collaborated on projects, often with Cage in his teacherly mode, suggesting ways to experiment with the allied arts of music and dance.

The Cunningham archivist and dance writer David Vaughan notes in the International Encyclopedia of Dance that, “instead of choreographing movement to existing music, as was done in ballet, or composing music to follow the counts of a dance made in silence, as was often done in modern dance, Cunningham and Cage . . . worked within a common rhythmic structure; dance and music came together at certain specific points but they otherwise pursued independent existences.”

By the 1950s, after both developed an interest in Zen Buddhism and Eastern philosophies and art, the idea of “chance procedures” entered the mix of both men’s creative process. In Cunningham’s case, this method of working was utilized variously to determine such aspects of a dance composition or individual performance as duration of time (for a phrase, or a particular segment), order of individual segments, and choice of direction (for an entrance or exit, or for which way the dancer or the dancing might face at a specific moment).

It should be emphasized that none of these “chance” elements ever pervades the performance itself as a kind of improvisational element. Cunningham’s use of chance by way of tossing coins or consulting the I Ching became a part of his process of composition, a way for him to build a choreographic work without depending solely, or even at all, on his own intuition or habits. Essentially, then, it’s a behind-the-scenes process of selection, not an anything-can-happen “logic” pertaining to individual performances of individual dances.

Cunningham’s dances all have a genial, comfortable structure about them, a kind of humaneness that breathes through the natural manner of his dancers and their unaffected expressions of calm confidence, sometimes evident in the utterly unselfconscious, fleeting smiles. Though the choreography’s structuring, patterning, and particular moves might have been arrived at by chance along the way, the formal presentation and their repeated performances exude the glow of order, control, and even a sense of momentary inevitability.

When you see a Cunningham dance for a second or third time, you relive the dance experience you had previously, give or take the variance in your own world and mood, and the possible flexible variants built into the dance’s overall shape. Cunningham’s lithely built male and female dancers are remarkably fleet, unaffected, and expert athletes whose contemporary look grounds the activity in a natural world.

Though the choreographer’s equal part in collaboration with the individual composers and designers chosen for each separate work gives his fellow creators their own freedom and individuality to (as Cage would have it) “do their thing,” Cunningham does have a say in matters if some design or music notion proves unworkable to the dance and the dancing.

Speaking once to me about a designer’s intention to include panels for décor and related, loose panel elements on the dancers’ costumes, Cunningham noted that the inevitability of such details flapping around obtrusively made him “very nervous,” thus forewarning his designer about a possible, eventual need for adjustments. In another interview he also stressed that this idea of independence, of the visual and sound creators working on their own–separate from one another and from the choreographer himself as he created his dance–did not mean that he was trying to keep things a mystery, or secret.

“If they have questions,” he noted with regard to the music and design people working on a particular dance for him, “I try to answer them. I’m not trying to hide anything.”

Similarly, he stressed to me at one point that he was in no way trying to shock as an artist. I don’t think that I’ve yet seen a Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance where some element of the audience didn’t walk out before the final curtain. Sometimes such walk-outs are sheepish, or harrumphing, or just weary. But whatever the motivation, I cannot imagine Cunningham’s being pleased that he sent any one of them packing. After stating an unhesitating “no” to the notion of looking to shock, he added that he liked what Cage once said about such people: “I’m out to bring poetry into their lives.”

So why, I asked myself, having found the poetics of much of Cunningham’s repertory so stirring and eye-filling over the past 35 years, or so, put Ocean somehow short of the summit of his most impressive achievements? I’d give a lot to see again, to give but one gloriously memorable example, Roaratorio, a 16-dancer work loosely based by way of Cage’s Irish-music, Joyce-connected score, and Cunningham’s explorations of jigs and reels, and which I saw just about every performance of when Cunningham’s Company presented the hour-long work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1986.

I can still recollect the limpid colors of Mark Lancaster’s casual-clothes designs, the shimmering patter of Cage’s word-collage score mixed with the drumming of some Irish percussionists, and the compelling, easygoing concentration of moves and ravishingly arranged groupings of dancers. The dance’s grand but easy design seemed, during its 60-minute duration, to pass incrementally from one wing of the stage to the other, with worlds of divergence in-between.

Ocean, I found, both here and in 1996, to be more intellectually impressive than visually and theatrically thrilling. Maybe it’s the “lack of front,” which, given the scheme of a circular performing area, Cunningham has spoken of as being so challenging and unusual as a way to plan his dancers’ moves, positions, and groups. Maybe it’s the large space needed to accommodate the dance, the encircling audience, and the further encircling musicians. Maybe it’s the disorientation it presents, literally throwing a curve, as the “surround” viewing experience becomes so different from the expected, frontal-focus point of view. Maybe it’s the complexity involved in the actual choreographic activity, based on 128 movement sequences suggested by double the I Ching‘s favored number of 64, because of the length of time predetermined early in the work’s conception on a 90-minute duration.

Actual digital timing screens tick off the seconds along the way. These timers are placed where the dancers and the musicians can all use them to get their respective bearings (the Cagean score by Andrew Culver has no conductor) and where the audience can tell how far into, or out of, the “ocean” of dancing it’s come. (To be sure, both performances of Ocean I attended in this run included walkouts, usually from the one-hour point onward.)

In sum, I missed something magisterial in the grand scheme of Ocean, and something personal in the participation of the dancers. In this large-scale arena, wearing Marcia Skinner’s tropical-fish-colored body tights, and under the lighting of Aaron Copp, they all seemed more anonymous than individually distinct as male and female artists delineating a Cunningham dance.

Since he stopped performing on stage in the mid-1990s–his own words describing his participation in Enter, a 1992 dance, go like this: “I stand still in one part; and in the other I try to move”–Cunningham only now comes onstage, haltingly, for curtain calls. In the case of Ocean at the Rose Theater, he kept his eye on his dancers and the digital counters from a box positioned at one arc of the stage’s edge. I kept sneaking a peek at the sphinx-like “watchman” as he followed the paces he had so carefully arranged for his company to go through. When he finally stood up, with some difficulty, to take his bow alongside Culver, he was given excited cheers. He reminded me of an emperor, a czar, and the ovation treated the nodding, white-haired dignitary accordingly.

I suspect, even to those who rated Ocean more highly than I did, that the vocal approval was directed more at the man than the work itself. And why not? Merce Cunningham has been sailing the high seas of high art for a good long time, on a steady though hardly well-trafficked course. And the poetics he has stirred up are some of this, and the last century’s, most memorable.

Robert Greskovic is the author, most recently, of Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet.