sarma

I'd much rather watch Merce Cunningham's dances than write about them. They already get more exegesis than they need, because people like to talk about dances afterward in order to prolong their (the dances') ephemeral existence. Anyway, you have to have something to do on the subway ride from the Brooklyn Academy to Manhattan.

Perhaps my best course would be to spit a bunch of grapefruit seeds onto a piece of land I call mine and dedicate the resultant grove, or barren patch, or maybe just the ceremony of spitting, to Merce. As soon as the ground gets softer...

But in the meantime, I'd better add my arid analyses to the heap. (The first question I was asked after I had lectured - I thought quite cleverly - to students at Ohio State was "Why bother with criticism at all?") To me, Cunningham's most innovative work in recent years has been in his tamperings with stage space. His dancers dart and streak over the area in a way that makes space elastic, able to bend and change from second to second. The sudden collisions and intersecting paths set up knots of tension that then release the energy in new directions. Also fairly recently, the various people who do Cunningham's decor have abetted this process of breaking up the conventional proscenium while staying within it.

For Tread, Bruce Nauman has planted a glittering beanrow of tall electric fans across the front of the stage; they all spin their blades, but some revolve and some do not. The dance is breezy, and the audience in the front part of the orchestra feels this as well as sees it. Cunningham and his nine collaborators streak about the remaining space with a thoughtful impudence. The men wear woolly pants and shirts, the girls have legwarmers and skimpy gym suits that reveal a fair amount of their buttocks. In parts of the dance, people skid into ornate positions with each other and are then carefully rearranged or separated by others. Usually, some are sitting watching those who are temporatily more active. You get a sense of people imprinting themselves or part of themselves on each other, on the floor, on the air.

Cunningham's other new dance, Second Hand, turned out to be most surprising. It begins with a long solo for Cunningham himself. He stands - in one spot - making the movement ebb and flow very slowly within this small compass of space. Carolyn Brown enters, and the two perform a sober, balanced duet. The unstudied, unforced perfection of her dancing never ceases to delight me. Then the whole group enters, in leotards that shade delicately into each other as the stripes of a rainbow do. Suddenly, strangely, Second Hand begins to look slightly like parts of other Cunningham dances (certainly typical recent Cunningham movement) done in slow motion. The company strides, darts, turns at an almost somnolent pace. The music (this is unusual too) reinforces the serene rhythm of the dance: John Cage doodles sweetly and sparsely on a piano something that he calls Cheap Imitation. It is, apparently, an imitation of Satie's Socrate, performance rights for which were denied at the last minute. Toward the end, bands of dancers keep breaking into brief unison passages; then they quietly detach themselves from this temporary alliance and return to their own soft fragmentations. Finally, they are forming into changing couples and trios, sliding and bending against each other. At first, I couldn't get with the dance, but near the finish, the accumulation of beauty finally became too heavy and dropped over me, and I succumbed.

This Brooklyn Academy season also featured a revival of Cunningham's Crises (1960). Chance procedures were employed in its creation to determine things like the predominant modes of movement in each section, the number of participants in each section, some factors to do with isolation of a particular part of the body, etc. Chance also determined the methods of using circles of wide elastic, by means of which the dancers can become temporarily attached to each other. The music (some of Conlon Nancarrow's Rhythm Studies for Player Piano) was added later. The dance was to be "about" the joinings and separatings of four people (one man and three women); by slipping a hand under an elastic band worn around someone else's waist or wrist, a dancer could be joined to another and yet free. Seeing Crises now, one is tempted to say that Cunningham was concerned more just then with radical use of movement than radical use of space. Viola Farber has rejoined the company as a guest artist to recreate her original role in Crises, and the movement for her is truly astonishing. Her body, elegant yet earthy, is capable of an infinite number of little isolated shifts within a longer line. As Merce says about her in one of his perceptive scribbles (at least I think it's about her): " ...her body often had the look of one part being in balance, and the rest extremely off."

It's interesting how dancers can change the look of a dance. Carolyn Brown, of course, was in Crises when it was composed, but Marilyn Wood and Judith Dunn have been replaced by Sandra Neels and Susana Hayman-Chaffey. I didn't see Crises with its original cast, but I can imagine the difference. Neels and Hayman-Chaffey both happen to have wise, supple legs that appear to reach all the way up to little-girl faces. Often paired in Crises, they look like members of one sleek, beautiful species. Dunn and Wood could hardly be more dissimilar: the former possessing a fluid kind of weightedness and an uncompromising gaze, the latter long legged in a slightly brittle, heron-like way. Crises must have been quite another dance. In the same way, Rainforest now has a slightly different quality because Meg Harper has replaced Barbara Lloyd, and Chase Robinson has replaced Albert Reid. Harper (now delicately foxy looking, probably owing to a diet so stringent that I don't even want to think about it) brings more than a trace of eroticism to the opening duet with Cunningham, and Robinson begins his dancing with a tautness that seems directed toward them. Rainforest opens with a very human tension that I don't remember being in the dance when it was first done. Strange, by what subtle and intimate means a piece of art unfolds its possible meanings.

As usual, Cunningham and all his dancers and musicians performed with absorption and beauty. Andy Warhol's mylar pillows for Rainforest were the only element that tended to deflate.

My comments on Second Hand typify the dilemma of the critic who isn't sure what he/she has seen, but writes about it anyhow. The pseudonymous Michael Snell in Volume 3, number 6 of Ballet Review and Carolyn Brown in the brilliant article she wrote for the book Merce Cunningham (edited by James Klosty) have both pointed out the close formal connections between Second Hand, Satie's Socrate, and Plato's Phaedon - the dialogue which recounts the death of Socrates. Perhaps Cunningham would not want us to know this; he has been almost belligerently reticent about imposing "meanings" on his dances. However, it is impossible to watch him perform and not know that his movements have significance for him. Even forgetting Socrate, it seems to me that I didn't see Second Hand clearly or deeply.

The title of this article was my attempt to make an anagram out of “Tread" and "Second Hand".