Oceanography

"Ocean"
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Rose Theater
The Lincoln Center Festival
New York City
July 12-16, 2005

Prologue

"Could you make a dance in the round?" John Cage asked Merce Cunningham before the James Joyce/John Cage Festival in Zurich, in June, 1991. He had in mind a dance performed in the middle of a circular space, surrounded by the audience and then musicians, in concentric circles. There being no suitable venue at the Swiss event, Cage's idea was set aside, and a little more than a year later, he died, quite unexpectedly. Cunningham went on to make dances that seemed to subsume Cage's death—among them "Doubtletoss" and "Enter"–and to carry forward his notion, moving, as in "Breakers," ever closer to the sea. Cage's grand concept was first fully realized in Brussels on May 18, 1994, at the vertiginous theater-in-the-round called the Cirque Royal. There, for the first time, 112 orchestra musicians played a complicated 2,403 page score, "Ocean 1-95," by Andrew Culver, elaborating on Cage's initial plans; and at the same time, David Tudor introduced his live electronic soundscape, "Soundings: Ocean Diary," comprised of eerily reprocessed underwater noise. Marsha Skinner's sea-inspired leotards and filmy dresses painted the dancers in purples, turquoises, oranges, mauves, violets—the colors of the sun, the sky, the untroubled sea. The dance itself was an amazement: 90 teeming minutes of a dance perfectly without front, back, or sides. It contained (about 26 minutes from the start) a figure–dancers in a circle, arms linked, variously balanced—from the very center of a Cunningham work called "Beachbirds," made in 1991. Also carried forward, though subtle means of casting and configurations, were threads from his other Joycean epic made with Cage, "Roaratorio," which itself had since been echoed in "Enter."

With its slow beginning and convulsive ending–from nothing to everything and back to nothing—"Ocean" also recalled that other Cunningham tour de force with a Joycean title, "Sounddance." ("In the beginning, was the sounddance.") Both were creation myths. And both, despite the separate conception of score, decor, and dance, had a fantastic unity of impression.

The Voyage Out

Right after that opening night performance, Cunningham said, "Now all my dances look flat to me." His next dance, "Ground Level Overlay," premiered in 1995, recreated many of the multi-directional effects of "Ocean" on a proscenium stage, and one might have expected him to go on in this rich vein. Instead, having mastered the problems inherent in these two complex works, Cunningham moved on to still a different way of working—other complexities, other challenges—making a series of works that looked like channel zapping, with concomitant, and near-impossible, refinements to his technique, which now required getting from "here" to "there" without the "to."

"Ocean," meanwhile, circled the globe: to La Fenice in Venice, which burned down right after; to Japan; to the first Lincoln Center Festival in 1996, where it had a fantastic run in a specially built theater in Damrosch Park. In all, there were eight productions, and then it was gone.

In the intervening years, parts of the dance have been seen in Cunningham's "Events, " which are intermission-less concerts made up of excerpts from the repertory and newly made material. The original cast, but two, retired from the company. And sadly, Chris Komar, Cunningham's assistant at the time "Ocean" was made, died, and so, later on, did David Tudor.

The Return

In 1992, Robert Swinston, a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for twelve years, became the assistant to the choreographer, and began work on meticulous archival constructions of works that had fallen out of performance. Jeannie Steele, who had joined the company just the year before "Ocean" and danced on to become the senior female in the troupe, in June 2001 was appointed rehearsal director. They are the only members of the original cast of "Ocean" still dancing, and it fell to them to bring back the dance, so that the choreographer could recalibrate his intricate epic.

The only change in scheme was an adjustment in number. Matthew Mohr joined the company while the work was being made, and in consequence had a small role. So also did China Laudisio, who traveled through sections of the dance paired with Emma Diamond, and appeared in group sections but had no significant duet or solo tasks. Their two small parts are now combined into one, danced by Daniel Roberts. This has the salutary effect of giving the beauteous Lisa Boudreau (in Diamond's part) a cavalier during a wonderful section of the work in which she travels on a journey through two twined configurations of dancers, as if through a maze. (There are two other such moments in the dance when, in a kind of story-theater effect, some dancers become scenery. There is the circle of men so like the circle in "Beachbirds," though which Boudreau will weave her way, followed by three other women. And there is a pergola made by raising Jennifer Goggans up high and flat in the air, like a lovely roof, where again dancers weave in and out, like goldfish in and out of a miniature castle.)

Some of the originals were in the house for the New York performances, seeing for the first time the piece they had made with Cunningham more than ten years ago. This was a significant revival, with the current company taking on, all at once, singular solos and highly charged duets created by singular and high charged performers. The shapes are the same, the steps are the same, but what you might call the fragrance is different, because the chemistry is different.

Ocean's 14

Here is how the casting falls out (proceeding alphabetically), first cast to revival:

Kimberly Bartosik–Jennifer Goggans
Thomas Caley–Jonah Bokaer
Michael Cole–Cédric Andrieux
Emma Diamond–Lisa Boudreau
Jean Freebury–Holly Farmer
Frédéric Gafner–Daniel Squire
China Laudisio–Daniel Roberts
Matthew Mohr–Daniel Roberts
Banu Ogan–Andrea Weber
Jared Philips– Koji Mizuta
Glen Rumsay–Rashaun Mitchell
Jeannie Steele
Robert Swinston
Cheryl Therrien–Marcie Munnerlyn
Jenifer Weaver–Julie Cunningham

Cunningham, of course, did this casting, and it is exceedingly strong. In some cases, the current dancer bears some physical resemblance to the original, as with Munnerlyn and Therrien. In others, they are nothing like. Throughout, the originals are proclaimed by their successors, as when Bokaer echoes, on his very different body, Caley's plush plié and remarkable relevé. The greatest change is not in a solo, where you might expect to find it, nor in any of duets, where the personal dynamics are so altered, but in two group sections (one at about 27 minutes into the dance , the next at about 56 minutes), where women are joined by a single man. In 1994, this was Jared Angle, a blonde, curly-haired, cherub. With him, the women looked like goddesses playing with Ganymede, their cup-bearer. With the virtuoso very grown-up Koji Mizuta in the role, the women look like his harem, or a bevy of sirens, sent to sing him to his ruin.

Love Makes the World Go Round

There are four dedicated couples in "Ocean:" Munnerlyn and Mitchell, Goggans and Squire, Steele and Bokaer, and Weber and Andrieux, with the rest of the cast rather more fickle. Swinston, in particular, plays the ladies man, gallantly tending to Boudreau and then the tempering the firebrand Farmer with grim resolve. Steele, meanwhile, still scampers like a girl, touchingly escorted by her serious young swain Bokaer, whom she charms with smiles. Munnerlyn and Mitchell are complimentary angularities (the originals were more contrasted, he being attenuated and she remarkably fluid). The other two pairs are so ardent you can feel their every touch. Goggans is a natural soubrette, but rises to the drama occasioned by the exceptional focus and attack Squire brings to this role, and indeed all his roles. And Andrieux! Not only does he rule the men's section like Poseidon, he turns what was (with Cole and Ogan) a kind of temple sculpture come-to-life episode into a French film. And a hot one.

Much to the credit of this revival, each of these duets has a different movement character, which is consistent from the first production, quite apart from the casting. You can, if you want to, read them as a Cunningham primer on partnership in dance, or, if you will, in life. A couple can mirror each other, a couple can follow one another, one partner can pursue another, and one partner can seduce the other, a couple can get all mixed up with each other so you can hardly tell them apart, or a couple can proceed though life in parallel, facing everything together, side by side.

What Goes Around....

"Ocean" is made up of some 128 phrases, and choreographed using chance procedures to determine facings, numbers of dancers on stage at given times, and the timings of entrances and exits, but these compositional devices having no bearing on the experience of seeing it. What does determine what you see is where you sit on the 360 degree front of the piece. But while in Damrosch Park there was a sense of foreground and background—what was in front of you felt immediate, and what was across seemed to be happening on the other side of the world; the Rose Theater was wonderfully intimate. There was a great sense of simultaneity and complexity. The excellent acoustics enhanced this effect, submerging the viewer in a sonar bath.

Perhaps the most complex parts of "Ocean" are the tricky large group sections; a swathe of these transpire at about 65 minutes into the piece, when there is a great sweep of group movement. From upstairs–and up is the place from which to see this work, if you can—there is a section where, as trios surround single frozen figures and animate them, you feel as if a spiral staircase were swirling in front of you, with all the figures on it moving down. By then your eye has accustomed itself to the language of this dance, which Cunningham lays out at the open, with two solos.

"Ocean" begins with Daniel Squire performing a phrase—almost like an alphabet, or a vocabulary—in varying directions, so that you see him do the same thing first from one angle, and then from another. He exits, and Julie Cunningham—a pristine technician with perfect placement—comes in and gives the feminine version of the text. You see this and you of course move on with the dance, but the choreographer will bring you back here later, restating their themes. Some 70-odd minutes into the piece, several of the women in turn are lifted by three men, and put down again facing different directions, as if they were sculpture and their porters (Bokaer, Mitchell, Roberts, a frequent trio throughout) were art movers. One of these is Julie Cunningham. Then at about 78 minutes, Squire returns with three women, but they do not carry him. Rather, he moves from position to position—stepping out in huge "rondes de jambe," or outward circles of the leg, tracing giant curves on the floor. When he pauses, the women support him (he assumes a different statuesque pose at each of ten points on the stage) and are at the same time supported. Somewhere in the sequence, he transforms into Apollo, and they into the Muses, and then, the notion vanishes. But the allusion is there, if you want it to be, as is any other meaning you want to find.

Full Circle

The technique that binds "Ocean" into a whole is the use of recurrence and repetition of what we might call visual "rhyme." For instance, take a phrase performed by Jonah Bokaer. He commands the stage at the time, about 26 minutes into the piece, moving in a fast circling outward with one leg moving like a propeller. This is performed again near the end of the piece by two women, as part of a complex group section where it catches your eye by chance. This sort of thing happens throughout. A phrase or figure is often clearly and quite ravishingly repeated—as when Jeannie Steele is lifted, at 62 minutes, in different directions, so that she seems to be sailing around the stage. But also, a phrase can be echoed almost subliminally. So: the same phase, different dancer, different direction, different configuration on stage. This effects what in a poem would be feminine rhyme, or slant rhyme. A rhyme that's slightly off, but there. In this manner, Cunningham casts his net, elastic and strong.

For all the circularity of "Ocean"—there's one giddy moment when Robert Swinston spins like a top in order to move—the most magical of its directions is up. Up, up. Above the work—in Brussels it was rigged to rise over the piece as the dance began—is a white mesh disk. It could be the top of a tent, it could be the sky, it can be whatever you want it to be. To me, it seems like a veil. Something we cannot see through, or beyond. There is light behind it, so that when the dancers look up, as they often do throughout the piece, they are illuminated. As a practicality, their gesturing up includes those in the upper tiers of the theater in their activities. As a metaphor, they may be saluting something, or someone, up above us, in the boundless aether.

Epilogue

Not that Cunningham would suggest that—something metaphorical. But neither would he mind it. Just like all of his work, "Ocean" is different for each viewer. As usual, the choreographer encourages individual interpretation by avoiding conventional story-telling, instead making movement drama via off-kilter trios, juicy duets, intense solos, teeming group sections; and also by contrasting types of movement. Allegro and largo. Largo within allegro, allegro within largo. Stillness contrasted with steppiness; heaviness contrasted with lightness. Trios carried across personnel, so that a series of dancers performs one long phrase. Morphing groups, so that a quintet becomes five solos, or a trio and two solos, catching you up in the inconstant, changing relationships. But here, in this dance, in "Ocean," the physical set up—the audience seated in the round, and the choreography made so that every point on its 360 degrees is the front—enhances what you might call the psychic set up. What seems to be arriving to you seems to be leaving to me. (In this way a Cunningham dance, and this one especially, is a lot like life.)

You might have experienced "Ocean" as an episodic adventure along the lines of the "Odyssey," or perhaps as a romance, with each duet its own love story. Or yours may have been a more contemplative perspective, with the dance viewed as seascape, or moving sculpture. Your particular lens may be microcosmic, so that the tricky fugue sections looked like step dancers on a village green; or it may be macrocosmic, so that these figurations appeared as constellations—just what you would see if, one starry night at sea, you gazed up at the sky. Whatever you saw in the dance, every night of this past week, you could see (unless you were in the tier above him, sharing his perspective) Merce Cunningham, seated in the first tier of seats, watching his dance from the audience. The maker, out among us, sharing his vision. He sees and shows us the world without preconceptions, but with a clear mind, a constant curiosity and an open heart. 

Photos (all by Stephanie Berger):
First:  The company in "Ocean."
Second:  Rashaun Mitchell and Marcie Munnerlyn perform "Ocean"
Third:  Cedric Andrieux and Jeannie Steele perform "Ocean"
Fourth: Daniel Squire arm up, with three women: Jennifer Goggans on left, Holly Farmer partially visible, Jeannie Steele

Volume 3, No. 27
July 18, 2005
copyright ©2005, 2010 Nancy Dalva
danceviewtimes.com

Sounddance in Springtime

Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Eisenhower Theater
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, D.C.
April 1 & 2, 2006

"Okay, shall we begin?" — Merce Cunningham, teaching company class on the stage of the Eisenhower Theater, April 1, 2006

Every two years, in the spring, The Merce Cunningham Dance Company plays the Kennedy Center, a theater where the company, and especially the choreographer, are held in high and affectionate regard. Indeed, among Merce Cunningham's many honors are those bestowed by the Kennedy Center. This is then, his house. And it is, too, our house, because it sits on the Potomac, in the city which belongs to the nation. The Cunningham company plays the world, and has for more than fifty years, but to see them in Washington is always somehow significant, just as to see them in Paris is somehow always magical, and to see them in California is to be drenched, somehow, in sunshine. That is, each city, each theater, each night has its own character, its own correspondences. One cannot escape the political in Washington, and so, although this choreography and this artist are as removed from that scrum as, say, the planet Neptune, there are force fields.

"Hey, Merce," one of the technicians says upon entering the stage area and seeing Cunningham regarding the drapes and swags of Mark Lancaster's gold curtained backdrop for "Sounddance," a marvelous piece of scenery that looks like a dress by the American couturier Charles James. The work, the last on the program tonight and tomorrow, is one of the very greatest of dances not merely of Cunningham's, but ever—it is as iconic as the original "Sacre du Printemps," and shares its convulsive energies, musically and choreographically, though there the resemblance ends. The techie walks up to shake the choreographer's hand. "Good to see you, sir. You just keep coming back." "Hi Merce. Good to see you." "Merce, what do you think of the draping?" It's the same old, same old, and how wonderful that is and how lucky we all are will be seen that evening, when the curtain goes up on a triple bill. In tonight's program, there will be no biography of Cunningham. He will not take a bow, nor will be tomorrow, though he will receive the accolades of his audience—many now grown sweetly grey along with him—during a panel discussion after the first performance, when he will be seated center stage, his dancers, his archivist David Vaughan, the composer Christian Wolff (there to play John Cage's "ASLP" for the opening dance), and several of his dancers beside him.

"Although the dances that come from the past are brought back in the way they were done," Cunningham will say, " We all know these are different people. This to me is not wrong, but the way life is. Certainly the character of 'Sounddance' is what it was, but they are different people and the energies are different—this is one of the things that I like about bringing back pieces, knowing that these people are who they are." So much for nostalgia. (The dance was first performed on March 8, 1975, in Detroit, Michigan, with Cunningham in the central role.) Hello, tonight.

Often in discussions and articles about "Sounddance" Merce Cunningham is quoted as saying that the title of the dance is taken from "Finnegans Wake," a book read and reread by the composer-philosopher John Cage, who was immersed in Joyce ( and so thus was Merce, his near-lifelong partner, immersed). The quotation usually given, "In the beginning was the sounddance," is in fact an elision. Here it is properly:

"the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you're in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy." — James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"

This happens to describe the dance perfectly. It begins as the curtain goes up on a bare stage, cloaked in black side curtains, with the 10 feet or so of Lancaster's curtained drop pendent on a dark field. There is a sense of a pool of light, and beyond, nothing. Or nothing knowable. The very center of the curtains are cut in strips, which overlap, just as the curtains drape to the floor, shutting out all sense of what lies beyond. We see this for about ten seconds, and then the utterly fabulous percussive soundscore by David Tudor kicks in, and keeps on kicking, with dense patterns of sound that are layered, like flocking on fabric, dense, rich, textured. Out of the center of the backdrop spins a lone figure. Once, it was Merce Cunningham. Now, it is Robert Swinston, the assistant to the choreographer and the company's senior member, and now just a year older than Cunningham was when he first danced the same part. It is a significant role, and a rare one, for this dancer is a master of ceremonies. You see this role, for instance in the wizard with- a -stick-wand the choreogrpher gave himself in "Signals," and more tangentially, in other Cunningham pieces—for instance, there is such a part in "Points in Space," originally danced by Chris Komar; and there are two such introductory incantations in "Ocean," first danced by Foofwa d'Immobilite and Jenifer Weaver, but there the dancer is more an introducer, a kind of invocator of the muse, not a presiding genius, and a presiding genie.

That genie is the choreographer, and this is, among other things, a dance about beginning a dance company; and beginning a dance. It is also a dance that functions, as do so many of Cunningham's nature studies, on a microscopic and a macrocosmic level. Birth of the universe? Creation of heaven and then the peopling of the earth? Cells dividing and redividing" The stage teems with life, life, life. "Sounddance" is a creation myth, for out from behind the curtain will next tumble nine more people, who will mate, conjoin, polymorphously generate life in the guise of more dancing, who will tilt against the air like salmon swimming upstream, with Swinston—in gestures I don't recall seeing in any other Cunningham work–placing the dancers, shepherding them, and manipulating one of the women as if she were a doll. His is a position of power, and at a price; all the energy on the stage spills out from him. He is the center, and the centrifugal force is fantastically powerful.

Here, before our eyes and in our ears, is one of those great moments when two arts—conceived separately and only converging in the theater, combine with a third, also made apart, as if they were made for each other. The first two are of course the costumes (grey tights, gold tops) and decor, the second the music. The dance wears and appears in the decor, and transpires to the score, with which it has in common duration of time. And in this case, intensity. There isn't another Cunningham dance with a greater unity of impression than this one. (I can think of some to rival it, but none more felicitous and more exponential, so that the sum of the parts is far greater than their individual value.)

This revival has been staged by Meg Harper and Robert Swinston, and it is really perfect, just as wonderful as the earlier revival by the late Chris Komar, who brought the work surging back to life as his own was being wound down by AIDS. The dancers are one and all wonderful as well, caught up in their constant complex lifts, spins, shifts, re-groupings, convulsive couplings and triplings, all fast. New orbits, new cells, and withal, some correspondences from the outer choreographic universe, the greater work of Merce Cunningham. For, as with any other great artist, you can look at his works separately, or as one great body. Here are elements known from other pieces—some earlier, some later. Small points of technical expression, like a flexed foot, as in starting a jig. (This is Joycean, after all.) And perhaps most central, that circle Cunningham sets forth, so like the circling dancers of Matisse. This figure occurs again and again in the work. Here, there is an inner circle, and surrounding it, a more loosely held one–as if the outer dancers are a chain link fence containing the inner performers. And in the middle of that, Swinston—or once, Cunningham—caught up in the vortex, with a partner.

As are we caught up, in the sound, in the dance. At the end, the applause roars forth, and people surge to their feet, for "Sounddance" is an efficient and exciting energy transfer device. (It fills you up, and you send it back.) They applaud the dancers, the musicians, and of course, they applaud the choreographer. He remains in the wings—withdrawn, you might say, behind the curtain, where he has been sitting in his customary spot, timing the dance and watching it with his mild yet eagle eye. The company takes two, brief curtain calls, and the lights come up while the audience is still in tumult.. "Where's Merce?" someone asked?

Merce is right there. He is in the dance, he is in the dancers, he is in the dancing. And he is with us, in the same space, the same time. We have watched his work together. He with stopwatch; we with starthearts. As first made, the dance ran 17 minutes; in Washington, in cherry blossom time, it ran a smidge longer, but to the second the same both nights. "Rhythm," says Cunningham, "is time cut up." Never was a muddle so clear.

photo credit: Tony Dougherty

originally published in danceviewtimes.com
copyright ©2006, 2010 Nancy Dalva

Chances Are
Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Howard Gilman Opera House
October 14, 16-18, 2003
By Nancy Dalva
Copyright ©2003 by Nancy Dalva
Rolling the dice gives a moment of wonder, the imagination conjuring. A split-second later, the dice at rest, the mind becomes active.— Merce Cunningham
Of all of the multiple innovations in the work of Merce Cunningham, the use of chance is the most confusing. Such a clear thing, this toss of a die, or a handful of pennies, and yet chance is the Holy Ghost of Dance—the part of the Cunningham Trinity taken on faith, and dimly apprehended. The independence of dance as an art form–the notion that dance does not need music, but may simply coexist with it—still may seem heresy to some, but as an idea it is well understood. The separation of dance from story is now old hat, or old enough, though still giving rise to the notion that Cunningham's dances are "abstract," when dance, because it is done by people, can never really be abstract. But chance! Chance makes people think of randomness, of disorder, of improvisation, of fate and fortune, of things made up as they are happening, or just before. Nothing, though, could be further from the Merceian truth, which is quite the opposite. His is not the unhinged Miltonic world of Paradise Lost, where "Chaos umpire sits," and "Chance governs all." Not in the slightest. In his world, Merce governs all, even when by a kind of non-doing, this latter being neither benign nor malign, but a kind of sovereign absenting of ego. Even when Cunningham does not make choices—as when, for instance, he leaves the decor to the art director, or some similar personage, who chooses the artists; and likewise hands off the music—he has chosen the chooser. The truth is that in his world, Cunningham is God. Every choice, or non-choice, is made by him.
In the chance procedures Cunningham uses at some point in the making of each of his dances, all the available elements are his. This movement first, or that one? The moves are all his. What number of dancers? The number available is up to him. Chance is simply a marvelous surprise-generator. And Cunningham likes surprises. Thus he must have enjoyed his season this past week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where chance procedures went public.
Opening Night
Iacta alea est.
The die is cast.
(Julius Caesar, 1st Century B.C.)
The world premiere of Split Sides, already infamous for the commissioning of two rock bands, the British Radiohead (post-modern rockers with an enormous following of teenage and twenty-something literati), playing live opening night, and the Icelandic Sigur Rós, who sweetly fall in love with the dancers and, as it turns out, will stay on in the pit for the whole run. Each band has composed a piece of twenty minutes and Cunningham has made two dances of twenty minutes (known as A and B ).
The company's general manager, Trevor Carlson, whose energizing notion it was to commission the rockers, has also arranged for two sets, both by photographers. One is by the 18-year old Robert C. Heishman, who works in black and white ( often using cameras made from everyday objects, with film in one end and a pin hole at the other.) The other is by Catherine Yass, working in color (using a large-format camera, and layering and lighting techniques to produce composite images with manipulated and heightened coloration).
James Hall, the resident costume designer, has in his turn made two sets of costumes, one black and white unitards, the other silky-looking bell-bottomed jumpsuits, all sleeveless, with acid-trip coloration. Each set of clothes is similarly imprinted with a network of black crisscrosses and branches suggesting twigs, or spider webs. So that we can see the whole thing, James. F. Ingalls has been called upon to devise interchangeable light plots, which, as a convenience, are given numeric names. One is from the 200 Series; the other from the 300 Series.
Shortly before each performance—so as to allow for a period of rehearsal-- Cunningham hands someone a die to cast, to determine the order of the two dance parts. The other elements are selected on stage before each performance of Split Sides.
On opening night, the curtain went up on Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City, who introduced Merce Cunningham and two of his former artistic directors, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, there to roll the die. Three titans of twentieth century modernism, gamely chancing it in the twenty-first. Cunningham walks with a cane now, and not easily, and the Merlinishness he has long exhibited is in full flower. He really does seem to travel backwards through time, meeting up with the young and showing them where the future lies. Rauschenberg has suffered a stroke, but his merriness seems intact. He is, as ever, a loveable public personage, while Johns has achieved a truly forbidding and magisterial aloofness, not the usual aspect of someone who is about to roll snake eyes (or not). Joining them on stage were the company's patroness saint, Sage Cowles; the bands; and the designers; and the dancers, who popped up now and then as they jumped to maintain a warmed-up state.
After Cunningham explained the chance process, to no small confusion and amusement on the part of the listeners, a die was produced for an on-the-spot determination of which of each two-part production component would go first. (This was sorted out by declaring one half of each odd, the other even.) Each die roll was projected on a screen, with the following results (including the pre-performance dance toss): even, even, even, odd. This yielded the following two-part version of the work:
Dance: A/B
Music: Radiohead/Sigur Rós
Sets: Heishman/Yass
Costumes: black&white/color
Light: 300/200.
"A gimmick," a man behind me would mutter later in the week, on the last night. (And it does take a lot of explaining, before one can even begin to get at the dancing itself.) But as it turned out, not a gimmick, but a revelation.
For while the elements stayed the same from performance to performance (although I guess you could quibble about the music, which has some built-in allowance for spontaneity), they would vary in their combination, though very slightly, as chance had it. The affect of the choreography, and the effect, would change from performance to performance, depending on the order of its arrival, what it wore, and where it was. (Just as you yourself appear different in a bathing suit at the beach or a winter coat at a funeral, though you may be standing the same way, and thinking the same thing.) One could make an aesthetic judgement about the various results; one might have a preference. From evening to evening, one went home floating on air, or shuddering. The audience response was vivid each night—the houses were sold out, right up to the rafters—but the group preference was clearly for color, for pleasure, and for a happy ending. So it was on the first night, which went from dark to light.
The first Split Sides began with black and white costumed dancers in front of a black and white backdrop depicting what was perhaps a ruined roller coaster, glimpsed through fog. The lighting throughout enhanced directionality—if the dancers looked up, light took their upturned faces. From the sides, light enhanced curves, sharpened angles. There were unobtrusive shifts in lighting levels, giving a sense of time passing, and of narrative—light suggesting, as it does, time of day, and time passing, or place changing, without overtly imposing meaning. Radiohead offered a sonorous and serious score, varied in texture, and with no overwhelming beat. It was not so very different in kind from other electronic music the company has commissioned in the past, and one felt the rockers were making a bid to follow in the serious footsteps of the electronic composers who have preceded them on the company roster. At any rate, they gave themselves over to the cause at hand, and served the Cunningham well. (To those strict Cage/Cunningham traditionalists who expressed abhorrence at the notion of the music having a beat, I would point out, just in passing, the scores by David Tudor for Sounddance and Michael Pugliese for August Pace. To those who were concerned by the potential intrusiveness of lyrics, which were at any rate few, I would mention Robert Ashley's wildly overbearing score for Eleven. Not that there's anything wrong with complaining, if one must; but it would be wrong to complain that what was happening was newly vexing.)
If the whole of this first half of Split Sides was wintry, hermetic, arctic, with the observing mind bouncing off the whole thing to careen around feeling very much alone, and the feeling heart pierced to the core, the second half was, to borrow an expression from Cunningham, an "all candy dinner." The effect was of starting off in Kansas, and ending up in Oz.
The costumes were happy and bright and sugary, the photographic backdrop smeared buildings into towering pastel after dinner mints, and Sigur Rós reached for a xylophone, a battery of timpani constructed of toe shoes, the recorded sounds of a baby cooing, and some wind-up devices they happily used to tick-tock along with what they could see from the pit. Thus as Derry Swan spun thrice around her partner Cedric Andrieux, Venus cavorting with Mars, the musicians made merry matching sounds. (For those who were appalled by this, I would only point out that the late David Tudor, Cunningham's music director after Cage's death, and a long time pit musician and composer for the company, by his own admission did the same thing, though not in such a rudimentary way. He admitted this backstage at the Paris Opera, after the first performance of Enter, when he could be seen ramping up the sound when the stage grew dark and dull and overshadowed by the set, as if in counter-balance. In other words, if there are rules, they've already been broken, albeit broken better.)
This part of the work also contains two passages of enormous warmth—a solo danced by the beautiful Jonah Bokaer, and a quadruple duet—that is, the same duet multiplied by four, that reads like a sermon on love, with each couple doing the same thing, but in its own touching and individual way. The Bokaer solo has some signature Merceian animal gestures—a swanny head preening on a feathery wing, a shaking of water off the face—but placed within a context of sculptural poses straight out of Donatello. Bokaer has mastered the Cunningham way of being one place and the next with no visible means of transit. He's mastered the invisible jump. It may embarrass him to hear it, but Bokaer has a radiance bespeaking goodness, and belief. (Not for nothing did John Cage and Cunningham name an early work Credo in Us.)
Bokaer appeared again in the quadruple duet, which incorporate a ravishing figure in which the woman climbs onto her partners' back as he lunges to one side, is carried over onto his front as he shifts to a lunge on other side, and knifes her legs over to end up behind him again. This is a beautiful and rapt a phrase as Cunningham has made, and for it he chose, as he usually does now, to pair Jeannie Steele (his Catherine Deneuve) with Bokaer, thus giving his senior female the dishy reward of his youngest man. (Like handing Nureyev to Fonteyn, though the age difference here is not so great.) Here too were Cheryl Thierren (Merce's still unravished bride of quietness, who has spent so much of her career in relevé, with one arm raised, the essence of the feminine, of water, of respite and of calm) paired with the classical exemplar Ashley Chen, both incredibly reticent, but with the uncanny ability to convey the feeling of flesh on flesh, as when he places his hand on her armpit, a move of really shocking intimacy that is then repeated by the other couples—the Olympian Swan and Andrieux; and Lisa Boudreau (a great beauty of harmonious proportions ) dancing with Daniel Roberts (a great brain whose dancing is powered by thinking).
Despite these lush interludes, and also a comedic trio reminscent of the Cunningham videodance Delicomedia, much of Split Sides is—like the program opener Fluid Canvas, a work new last year and new to New York on this season—fiendishly difficult, and notably spare. Both dances can readily be characterized as Late Cunningham, with the choreographer frequently working in multiple images of the same figure—for instance, eight dancers each doing the same thing, but each with a different front, so we see the step from different sides at the same time. 360 degrees, all from your seat. Cunningham always stands at a kind of choreographic South Pole where every direction is North; or alternatively a North Pole, where every direction is South. For him, every direction is front. Here he fractures the figure into multiples, in angular, sparse poses that refract each other, so that the stage is a prism. This part of his work is unforgiving, and from a distance, chilly. Up close, as from the second row, the personalities of the dancers enliven it. Where you sit makes the dance different as much as any chance changes rung before the curtain—but that is always true at a dance performance. You can sit back, and see the night sky, or sit close, and see the human condition. 


Second Night

Times go by turns, and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.
Robert Southwell (Times go by Turns, 1595)

The throws of the die yield even, even, odd, odd. Only one element changes, the costumes. Thus:
Dance: A/B
Music: Radiohead/Sigur Rós
Sets: Heishman/Yass
Costumes: color/black&white
Light: 300/200.
Rather surprisingly, the flipping of costumes makes a new dance—or perhaps the same dance with a different mood. In fact, Split Sides looks very moody indeed this way, resembling some sort of cruel psych experiment. To wit: in an arctic landscape, some Tahitians are set down. And vice-versa in the second part. Instead of harmony, disjunction; and the drama of contrast, but only visual. (These would not be the inherent contrasts of Cunningham choreography, where fast—and these days faster, faster, faster!—is set against slow, light against heavy, aerial against grounded, and so forth.) In sum: the dance was easier on the eye last night, and it has given up its unity of impression. This isn't to say there is a better version or a worse. But there is a pleasant and a much less pleasant. The disharmony tonight only points up the exigencies of this particular format, with the parts transposable.
By neccessity, Split Sides looks like a Cunningham Event, one of those signature amalgams of parts of various dances, rather than one of the great repertory works possessed of an ineluctible inevitablity. Because the halves can run in either order, they have to have beginnings and ends that won't put a dancer in two places at once, or in one place wearing one costume one second, and another the next. Thus the troupe is divided in half at signal junctures. But company and continuity are not the only things split.The body itself is split every which way—one half against another, side to side, top to bottom—and dancers themselves are split, even when dancing together. As evidence there exists the most difficult, cool, clinical duet ever devised by Cunningham, danced by two virtuosi of the impossible, the firebrand Holly Farmer and the soulful Daniel Squire. In this encounter, neither seems to have anything to do with the other, and yet they intersect, with hostile inadvertence. Finally, in anything but abandonment—she gives the feeling she could just reverse course with no need of a partner—Farmer falls back into Squire's arms in just the way that Cathy Kerr fell back into Alan Good's arms in the Cunningham masterpiece Points in Space. So similar, so different.


Third Night
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see....
(Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1733)

Everything turns up even. Thus:
Dance: A/B
Music: Radiohead/Sigur Rós
Sets: Heishman/Yass
Costumes: black&white/color
Light: 200/300
This is the same as the first night but with the lights switched, by far the most subtle change one can ring here. Light, which enables us to see, is hard itself to hold in the mind, to compare one half to the other. At any rate, this combination has the happy result of bathing the quadruple duet in a golden glow.


Closing Night
Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard.
A throw of the dice will never eliminate chance.
(Stéphane Mallarmé, 1897)
By now there is consternation in the front of the house, and a certain disbelief backstage. Night after night, and still the same order of music, dance, set! (If anyone thought the results were rigged, this certainly proved contrary—one somehow expected, and even hoped for a dog's dinner night to night, with everything all mixed up.) The pre-show cast inverted the dance order, so hopes were high at the public tosses—but the die came up odd all the way.
Odd! Odd! Odd! Odd! The two halves of the production were identical to the night before, but flipped. Thus:
Dance: B/A
Music: Sigur Rós/Radiohead
Sets: Yass/Heishman
Costumes: color/black&white
Light:300/200
Same old, same old, one should think. But no. The consequent change to the work is astonishing. Brought forth by a few rolls of a single die, tragedy comes calling. The first part, all warmth and sweetness, with young Jonah in his solo and the four couples in their love song, yields to the harsh wintry second part, with the dancers looking like extremely intelligent aliens who have just this moment come to inhabit human bodies, trying them out for the first time without knowing any of the human rules of moving. The eye glances off what it does not recognize—the glinting surface of the unfamiliar, as glances, too, the mind. Bleak, bleak, bleak—the summer of the first half giving way to winter, sunlit youth yielding to starlit age, remote and chill.
At the curtain calls, radiant Jeannie Steele—whose love for the dancing so suits her to be the choreographer's guardian angel—stepped off to get Cunningham. He entered on her arm and joined his troupe, taking his place at the far left of the stage. The company stepped back to allow him a solo bow, then turned as one to applaud him, so courteous, so gallant, so persevering, standing there in a brilliant orange shirt. Shortly thereafter, the curtain came down on the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's New York season. The company now will fly off to other theaters, other performances, Cunningham as ever traveling along to run the show from his accustomed place just off stage. Whatever chance procedures he has used in making the repertory will have been made, the process striking sparks to his own creativity. He will not, as he never has, be taking any chances on his dancers, whom he selects. For all the freedom he allows his composers and his visual artists, they are, at the least, known quantities when they are selected, and at any rate their work is made before the curtain rises. But there is indeed a rogue element at play at the time of the performance—an element that is random, uncontrollable, unknowable ahead of the event. Dicey in every way. That element would be us, coming into the theater with our minds cluttered and our sensibilities settled, carting around the baggage of the day. Night after night, year after year, in city after city, Merce Cunningham takes a chance on us.
All photos:  Jack Vartoogian.
Originally published:
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 1, Number 4
October 20, 2003
Copyright ©2003 by Nancy Dalva