What do we talk about these days when we talk about dancing? The perceived authenticity of Natalie Portman’s pirouettes in Black Swan? Seasonal fallout from countless productions of The Nutcracker?
How about the work of a monumental choreographer who influenced all of these scenarios by changing our very perceptions of movement and contemporary art?
This Friday and Saturday, Duke Performances will bring the legendary Merce Cunningham Dance Company, founded in 1953 by modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham, to the Durham Performing Arts Center for what will be the company’s final performance in North Carolina. The 14-member ensemble will perform three pieces: Sounddance (1975), Duets (1980) and BIPED (1999). Come the end of 2011, the company will dissolve permanently after two years of touring about 40 cities—as stipulated by the Legacy Plan left behind by Cunningham when he passed away July 26, 2009, at age 90. The last show will take place December 31, 2011, in New York City.
“I can barely imagine a more productive 60 years of art-making,” Director of Duke Performances Aaron Greenwald said. “This is a really big deal.”
Big enough to merit its own spot on Duke Performances’ 2010-2011 lineup, which is otherwise split into thematically organized series. Alongside “Inventors,” “Witnesses,” “The Sanctified” and others stands “Merce,” singular and unabashed—rather representative of the visionary company that grew out of his work with musician John Cage and avant-garde artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s.
“It was important for Duke Performances to take on and to structure a season around this—an intersection of American folk art and American avant-garde and the experimental,” Greenwald said. “Merce engaged all those things.”
The engagement began at Black Mountain College, an experimental institution located near Asheville, N.C. Now famous among scholars, archivists and arts aficionados, the institution remains somewhat unknown, as its doors remained open only from 1933 to 1957. Its concentrated community of innovators reckoned with both traditionalists and early modernists by treating art instruction and practice as vital to a true liberal arts education. Many of the students and professors moved on to different venues to play key roles in other artistic movements, such as the Beats of the later 1950s and the downtown art scene in New York City that took on several iterations throughout the ’60s and ’70s.
Cunningham came to Black Mountain in 1953 after a six-year soloist stint with the Martha Graham Dance Company—another group spawned from an iconoclast of modern dance. Cunningham, however, wished to diverge from Graham’s practices. He did so by abstracting typical performance structure in which the dancer dances a prescribed “role” within a representative narrative, and the audience in turn observes and easily understands the action. Cunningham stressed the importance of establishing independence among each performer.
“Cunningham wanted to create open structures that allowed audiences to participate in the story-making of the performance, without telling us what to think about whom,” said Thomas DeFrantz, professor in theater, arts and dance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At Black Mountain, this sort of radical experimentation began to take the form of “happenings,” theatrical performances staged by Cunningham and Cage, who would later become his life partner. Central to the performances was an understanding of the element of chance—something just beginning to figure into Cage’s compositions and not yet explored in the recent advent of modern dance. In an interview during the 1980s with English composer and musicologist Peter Dickinson, Cunningham described one of these “happenings” that took place between himself and several colleagues, including Rauschenberg and Cage: “We each simply did what we did. That is, I danced around through the public, which sat in the center with aisles between. It was a kind of agreed-upon length of time during which these things would take place. There was no connection other than what anybody looking at this could make. All these things were separate, and everybody was sitting facing a different way so that they would see or hear something in a different way.”
The ideas reflected in Cunningham’s statement became significant as his styles of dance and performance developed. Cunningham pioneered the idea of separating movement and sound—in effect, allowing the two to act independently of one another. From this practice emerged conscious, self-directed movement that still accommodated “chance” occurrences and new aesthetic possibilities. These ideas became ingrained in the newly formed Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which moved to New York after forming at Black Mountain in the 1950s.
Barbara Dickinson, director of undergraduate studies and professor of practice for the Duke Dance Program, recalls taking classes at the Cunningham Studio as a young dancer in New York during the 1960s and early ’70s.
“I loved his company and his choreography,” Dickinson said. “When you’re dancing and you’re attuned to sound and music not written for you as a dancer, you really begin to sense how your moving and the sound might seem to coordinate and at other times contrast. It’s a fascinating kinetic enrichment of what you’re doing.”
From this period onward, the company’s sense of experimentation further flourished. Cunningham’s interest in collaborating with visual and musical artists on his movement scores spread to new media technologies, and he remained prolific as a singular choreographer up until the day he died.
“Unlike a lot of artists who make their best and most definitive work early in their careers, it’s my sense that Merce [as he grew older] gained a better hold on technology and more sophisticated tools,” Greenwald said. “One could argue that much of his essential work was made later in his life.”
One example of this work is BIPED, which will be performed as part of the company’s Durham program. Along with Cunningham’s stylistic trademarks—quick directional changes paired with intensely controlled body movements—the piece features live motion-capture imagery projected onto a front scrim. As Cunningham became less capable of moving at the speed of his younger dancers, he grew increasingly fascinated by these types of technologies—as well as the computer program DanceForms, an electronic movement notation system.
Robert Swinston, a former company member who is now the company’s director of choreography, discussed these technologies, yet also stressed the importance of preserving the older work in which Cunningham himself danced. From this effort an educational workshop called History Matters was created during Cunningham’s lifetime. Duke will present a version of this archival program tonight at 6:30 p.m. in Reynolds Industries Theater.
“I actually started [History Matters] to enlighten our own students because they didn’t have the background and history of Cunningham and Cage,” Swinston said. “I wanted to show footage of Merce actually dancing so that they knew that Merce was a great dancer. I wanted to do that while Merce was [still living].”
In conjunction with company archivist David Vaughan, Swinston’s efforts to preserve Cunningham’s material are especially timely. Come December, the full company directly trained by Cunningham will no longer exist, and the works will be licensed to other dance companies, and then set on and interpreted by other bodies and artistic visions.
“Now, it will be up to emerging artists to take Cunningham’s legacy and make something new of it, something that will inspire audiences in the future,” DeFrantz said.
Before this happens, however, the Durham community has the unique opportunity to experience Cunningham’s vibrant conceptual history one last time.
“If people haven’t had this experience, they should have it,” Swinston said. “It’s not going to exist in the same manner anymore. If they don’t see it, they’re missing out. It’s a must.”
Merce Cunningham Dance Company will perform Feb. 4 and Feb. 5 at 8 p.m. at the Durham Performing Arts Center. Tickets are available at www.dpacnc.com.
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