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A Lifetime of Dance by David Vaughan
The title of Charles Atlas' new documentary on Merce Cunningham may be
taken quite literally: his mother described his dancing down the aisle of
the church the family attended in Centralia, Washington, at the age of four.
At 82, Cunningham is still making new work for the dance company he formed
at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in the summer of 1953. He has
rarely stopped dancing, certainly not since as a teenager he took classes in
tap and ballroom dancing from a local teacher. Even today, in spite of the
physical limitations imposed by age, he still demonstrates to his company
the movements he wants them to perform in class or in a new dance, and at
the end of rehearsal every day he demands five minutes alone in the studio
when he works by himself. As he has often said, his fascination with
movement is as strong today as it was when he started.
Movement itself is the principal subject matter of his dances: neither
narrative nor musical form determines their structure. His collaboration
with the composer John Cage began with Cunningham's first independent
choreography, in 1942, and lasted until Cage's death fifty years later. In
the course of their work together they proposed a number of radical
innovations. The most famous, and controversial, of these concerned the
relationship of dance and music. In the early dances, dance and music shared
an agreed time structure, coming together at certain key points but
otherwise pursuing independent paths. As time went on, even those key points
disappeared, and the relationship became still freer. The independence is
now total--famously, the dancers in Cunningham's company learn and rehearse
a work in silence and often do not hear the music until the first
performance, or at any rate the dress rehearsal.
Other conventional elements of dance structure were also abandoned:
conflict and resolution, cause and effect, climax and anti-climax.
Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or exploring psychological
states. This does not mean that drama is absent, but it arises from the
intensity of the kinetic and theatrical experience, and the human situation
on stage. Cunningham's dancers are not pretending to be anything other than
themselves-as he once said, "you are not necessarily at your best, but at
your most human."
The other principle that Cunningham and Cage shared was the use of chance
procedures in the composition of their works. Cage carried them through to
the process of realizing a work in performance, while Cunningham has
preferred to use chance not in the performance of his choreography but in
its composition. Even so, there are those who believe that the dancers toss
coins in the wings before going on stage, where they improvise. Nothing
could be further from the truth. By the time the choreography is given to
the dancers in rehearsal, Cunningham has largely worked it out, using chance
methods to determine the sequence of movements, where in the space they will
be performed, and by how many dancers. His dances are not lacking in
structure, but the structure is organic, not preconceived.
Paradoxically, Cunningham's use of chance processes produces not chaos but
order. Even in a chance piece, limitations are imposed by the existence of a
gamut of available movement material from which the dance phrases must be
put together-and, further, by the choice of that material that is then
determined by chance. And chance results in unforeseen ways of placing the
phrases in space and time. All the same, talent is clearly not excluded; as
with any other way of composing, ultimately what counts is the quality of
the imagination and craft that go into making the process work. If
Cunningham is generally recognized as the greatest living choreographer, one
reason for this is the sheer fecundity of his invention of steps: he likes
to quote the story of a great tap dancer who asked a colleague, "have you
made any new steps lately?" And that is what Cunningham does every day: any
new work he makes starts, he says, with a step that will lead him to the
discovery of something he did not know before.
David Vaughan is the archivist at the Cunningham Dance Foundation.
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