In 1940, Martha Graham choreographed El Penitente and cast Erick Hawkins, her handsome heartthrob, as The Penitent. The young Merce Cunningham was a Christ figure. That same year, Graham choreographed her Emily Dickinson dance, Letter to the World, and cast Hawkins as The Dark Beloved. Cunningham was the poet’s elfin wit. In 1944, Graham choreographed Appalachian Spring and cast Hawkins as The Bridegroom. Cunningham was a preacher.

Graham may have been concentrating hard on Hawkins, who was indeed her dark beloved and eventual (if skittish) bridegroom, but her take on Cunningham is the more piercing portrait. Christ figure, cool humorist, guru—all true. Cunningham would leave Graham’s company in 1945, would head to Black Mountain College with John Cage where, in a forty-days-forty-nights kind of immersion (actually about two years), they would create an aesthetic that was antithetical to Graham theatrics (and far more lighthearted), and would do nothing less than redefine purity in the theater, trading impulse for pulse, and feeling for seeing. Here at the end of the twentieth century, after more than forty years of dance-making, Cunningham is still a visionary. While the great Paul Taylor, in his rippling universe of leaping Manichean extremes, moral solstice and eclipse, plays God in his repertory, Cunningham plays Consciousness.

In other words, he plays. What Cunningham and Cage fixed on so early, finally, and threateningly, was the notion that the toss of a coin, the roll of the dice, the reading of tea leaves or the I Ching, was as viable a way to organize a dance as any other way. Chance was God. Chance was opportunity, the orange card in the board game—a “chance” to escape the monopoly of ingrained or clichéd artistic strategies. The scholar Roger Copeland, at work on a book called Cunningham’s Legacy, puts it thus: “Cunningham remains skeptical about the role that ‘natural’ and unconscious impulses play in the creative process… . Indeed, Cunningham makes a point of resisting his own ‘instinctive’ preferences (which is to say: the preferences that feel natural).” He isn’t into the power of id, or the auteur’s omnipotence. In fact, in her 1991 biography of Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille recalls that Cunningham did not care for his role as the preacher in Appalachian Spring, and, in the solo he himself choreographed, “showed more anger than was needed.” One wonders: was he already uncomfortable with the artist’s Promethean reach, or too comfortable with it? (No one has ever accused Cunningham of being simple.)

And so the choreographic elements of a Cunningham dance (the order of pre-choreographed sections, the length of those sections, the number of dancers in sections, etc.) were decided upon by alien or arbitrary forces. Likewise, the composer and the designers did their work in the dark, without epiphanal jam sessions on what it all was meant to express. Not until performance did the elements inhabit the same time and space, did the dancer hear the music (they knew the dance by counting) and wear the costumes. It was as if the dance had a mind of its own beyond Cunningham and his collaborators. Obviously, this creational void sitting at the back of each work made critics nervous. How do you review chance?

Forty years later, critics are still trying to answer the question. On the last day of Cunningham’s week-long October engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, part of this year’s Next Wave Festival, a panel called “Writing About Merce” was convened.[1] The problems discussed were easy to identify with, for writer and watcher alike. Take the absence of conventional music, aural structures that would cue you to where you are in a piece—this makes it difficult to remember steps, to fix them in a phrase. (It can also scare you into thinking the dance will never end.) And all those chance operations—they seem to wave away a committed analysis of a work. And if you do impose autobiography or allegory or metaphor on a work, are you not betraying it? Yet, during an intermission chat I had with Douglas Dunn, one of Cunningham’s first and most famous dancers, Dunn complained that critics never write about what the dances mean.

This anxiety about meaning is like an X factor at the core of Cunningham, an oscillating unknown in the mathematical formula (a sensation of higher math pervades both steps and sound, as so many of the scores consist of electronic oscillations and waves—E=merce2). A dance from 1989 called Cargo X could be a little key to Cunningham. In it, a backstage ladder brought on stage figures as, first, a prop—a ladder. It then begins to assume the iconic stature of an obelisk, exerting a pull on the dancers. Finally, as the dancers lay flowers on its rungs, that ladder has become a monument or tombstone. Cunningham’s “cargo” is bodies and time and change. In short, life and death. But Cunningham would never say so.

The most beautiful of the four new dances on Cunningham’s two BAM programs was Installations, a work from 1996 that plays, even puns, with an equation Cunningham walked away from when he walked away from Graham: the idea of art as church, an institution that “installs” spirit. As we all know by now, art installations tend to be big, empty spaces of nothing, usually with an electronic buzz piped in, often with a video screen nearby. Cunningham’s Installations has a décor by Elliot Caplan: three banks of video-screens (each made of four or six screens) positioned asymmetrically around the stage; the backdrop is a graceful swath of curtain. Pieced together within each bank of screens is a looming, stone-gray video of a stone-still (but breathing) dancer. They’re like refractions of the sculpted saints and angels you’d see in a cathedral—sculpture crossed with stained-glass—and they catch something of the height, the isolating scale, and sentience of cathedrals. Caplan’s lighting drapes the dance in Vatican gradations of rust, garnet, grape; and Trimpin’s score, at first art-museum minimal, gathers and grows throaty like organ chords, but chords played by the church cat lounging on the keys. When, amid a stageful of shadowy groupings, light falls on the feet of two dancers, each left foot tensed in the same demi-point position, it’s nothing less than an Adoration. Again, forget the preacher; Installations is like eyes wandering —a mind wandering—during the sermon.

The hot dance on the program was the world premiere, Scenario, a must-see for the cutting-edge set because of its costumes by Rei Kawakubo, founder of the fashion house Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo is that rarity, a truly avant-garde fashion designer. Disdainful of trends, her own as well as others’, her mantra is “Starting From Zero”—she is constantly starting over or subverting the norm (for instance, she’ll tinker with technology, loosen a screw in the weaving machines to get human imperfection, a human hand—chance—back into mass-produced fabric). As for shape, her three-armed sweater was a semiotician’s dream.

The much-awaited costumes for Scenario were versions of dresses Kawakubo showed a year ago in her Spring 1996 collection or, as some of the fashion press called it, the “Quasimodo” collection. Its signature silhouette was a body-hugging stretch dress with extra fabric bunched and pulled over tuberous humps and bumps in odd places (Artforum went crazy for it). Kawakubo said she was exploring human shape, testing and freshening the eye. But, she continued, if you slipped the down-filled pads out of their fabric envelopes you were left with a perfectly conventional stretch dress. The costumes the Cunningham dancers wore were dresses made in blue-and-white stripes or sea-foam gingham, followed by a group dressed in black, then one in irradiated tomato. The shapes were Disney animation—as if someone had loosened a screw in that machine—and the dancers looked like erratic toadstools, had Mighty Mouse chests and Popeye muscles, and even Saturn rings wrung around midriffs. Kawakubo’s set was a bare, white stage with high fluorescent lighting (a sort of ground zero).

The costumes stole the show. The first, colorful section suggested a tropical utopia, an undiscovered island of weird cultural signifiers, of Others dancing away. When the dancers came out in their black Kawakubos, I thought of French poodles groomed for show; or Victorian widows, their bustles askew; or the precarious black hair-buns of geishas; or Dior’s New Look, with its fertility goddess swells. I had not considered just how ubiquitous bumps and humps are in fashion history, how natural to the landscape of artifice. Nor had I ever seen the Cunningham dancers look glamorous in quite this way—in a fashion context. The women’s strong, slim, lower legs were suddenly gorgeous, feminine legs— eroticized. Gams.

But O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the costume? Scenario was difficult to see, literally, like watching a television in which the horizontal is out of whack with the vertical (“Do not attempt to adjust your television set …”). It was as if each dancer was moving within a sci-fi blur. Sit back and squint, and the stage picture was charming and bright, if untranslatable. Lean in and the dance was a bunch of arms and legs poking out of pillows—and poking out not very interestingly. What was clear is that we have powerful expectations regarding Cunningham dancers. We not only want to see their bodies, we need to. The articulation of the Cunningham mid-section (inner thigh, hip, waist, breastbone, clavicle)—so crisp, specific, sensitive, and solid—is the quick of Cunningham, the seat of his Senssurround perception. In Scenario, he wasn’t all there.

Actually, the same could be said for all four of the new dances (the two other New York premieres were Rondo, which had a motif of “watching,” and Windows, a rather ominous, inscrutable work with the color scheme of wet cement). Despite their various scores, palettes, and motifs, all four works were distant. All four were busy. Even Installations, so quietly lovely, was more a triumph of parts than of dance. None of these works had that sudden drop into intimacy that can make Cunningham seem the most wondrously sensual, the most listening, of choreographers (the illumination of two feet in Installations was about as intimate as it got.) None had that unpredictable pull, almost gravitational, into a pocket of concentration. This lack was brought into high relief by the BAMevents that were also on the program. Pieces of older dances elided together to make a new dance just for that evening, the BAMevents included sections of dances from the 1950s through the 1980s. The concentration of forces, the focused muscularity, the sheer sense of involvement in these snippets presented quite a contrast. One felt the difference dimensionally, in the palpable zones of space around dancers, and theatrically, in the precision-burn of speed, in a leg monumentally upheld—leg as will. One also realized, with a bit of a jolt, that there were no memorable pas de deux in any of the new dances. (The BAMevent duet from Un jour ou deux of 1973—great chaste spirals and stillnesses—begged the question and left one longing for more).

The fact that John Cage died in 1992 may or may not have some bearing on the missing duets in the new Cunningham dances. The fact that Cunningham is now using Lifeforms, a computer program for choreographers, to create his dances and then to activate them (instead of dice or the I Ching), seems significant. Maybe you can review chance.

On paper, anyway, the distracted, disembodied quality of the four new dances certainly corresponds to the distracted, disembodied quality you get from pictures on computer screens. The carriage of arms, so exact in Cunningham, so classically placed and yet quirky, brainy, was inexact and rather lost in the atmosphere. A fellow critic and avid Merce watcher was extremely bothered by those arms, and suggested that port de bras on the computer screen may be correspondingly inexact, a problem compounded by Cunningham’s not making the dances on his own body anymore.

We have watched Cunningham, who is now seventy-eight, age within his dances, and it has been a fascinating, funny, and sometimes unsettling experience. He has never tried to do physically what he cannot, the way Rudolf Nureyev used to (Nureyev, who relished the role of Preacher in Graham’s Appalachian Spring). He has used his older self choreographically, to make comments—humorous, sarcastic, sage, sad —on his position as aging master among young bodies. But watching Cunningham’s physicality pass out of his dance-making, taking with it that tough muscular intelligence, that acute attunement to pitches beyond the rest of us, is adjustment of another order. Cunningham, however, would probably say it’s all in the game.

Notes
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“Cunningham, Merce: Forward and Reverse,” featuring the choreography of Merce Cunningham, was performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from October 14, 1997, through October 19. Program A consisted of Rondo, a BAMevent comprising selections from earlier dances, and Scenario. Program B consisted of Installations, Windows, and a BAMevent. Go back to the text.