Dance
Wizard of the dance
Deirdre McMahon
In the silent section of Fabrications Merce Cunningham appears from the side of the stage looking like a slightly de- mented wizard. He seems to be uttering incantations while his hands weave myste- rious spells. Cunningham is certainly a magician. Now 70, he is still effortlessly in the avant-garde. His vision continues to challenge all our preconceptions about dancing, time and space.
Cunningham's company has now been in existence since 1953. His influence has grown enormously over the past 25 years, not just in America but in Europe also. His work has a huge following in France, so huge that it has provoked a powerful backlash among the French new wave groups. In England Cunningham's influ- ence has been felt particularly by Richard Alston and his Rambert Dance Company. Rambert's technique is based on the Cun- ningham class; the company has already acquired Septet and is staging Doubles this season. The visits of the Cunningham Company to England, sporadic in the Sixties and Seventies, have become regular during the present decade and have built up an enthusiastic audience.
'In my choreographic work, the basis for the dances is movement, the human body in time-space. It has no reference outside of that.' Behind Cunningham's deceptively simple credo there lies an aesthetic which has revolutionised the way we look at dance. It was his long-time collaborator, the composer John Cage, who urged Cun- ningham to view dance and music as separate entities, and in Cunningham's choreography movement, sight and sound are treated as different sensory areas. He revels in the resulting contradictions and Paradoxes. On a plane trip he once plug- ged in the music channel to a film of Joe Namath, the legendary American footbal- ler. The result, he said, was an absorbing dance. While many of his disciples have experimented in this area, few have fol- lowed the Cunningham path consistently; Alston mostly works with a musical score. This is not to say that Cunningham is unmusical; you just have to watch Septet to realise how subtle is his musicality.
Cunningham's training makes the body as flexible and resilient as possible, particu- larly the torso and the spine. His dancers are a virtuoso ensemble, sleek, lithe and strong. Rainforest (1968) is the earliest Cunningham work in the present London season. The Warhol set, with its floating silver pillows, never loses its magic and contrasts wonderfully with the elemental, compact movement of the dancers. Fab- rications is one of Cunningham's most lyrical pieces. The dancing is by turns bright, sombre, vivacious and reflective. There is an autumnal atmosphere (height- ened by Dove Bradshaw's evocative light- ing) which has led one critic to describe the work as Chekhovian. There is a quiet, slow quartet for four girls where they seem to be having long soliloquies with themselves and one is immediately reminded of The Three Sisters. The dance ebbs and flows in an unbroken series of encounters. It is full of virtuoso jumps and batterie which dis- play the Cunningham style in its most crystal' form.
In Carousal there are more unsettling undercurrents overlaid with a surface casualness. The dancers wear teeshirts and open blouses; in part of the sound text we hear the words 'osmosis' and 'arithmetical relationship'; at varous moments the movements become hidden by a blood-red sheet, or confined within the circle of a thick rope. One of the men mimics balanc- ing on a high wire, his hands held by two women who at any second might pull him over the edge.
Inventions and Field and Figures offer fascinating glimpses into the way Cunning- ham uses space. In Inventions we see diagonals, the dancers moving in croise, efface, joining each other, separating, leap- ing into each other's space and steps. In Field and Figures the space is more cellular and taut, like the dots and clusters of light on the backdrop.
Cunningham's inspiration seems infinite, but 36 years on, performances are still punctuated by the sound of seats being tipped up as irritated members of the audience head for the exit, baffled by it all. The old wizard's spells are as potent as ever.
'How many silk shirts? ... By when? ... You must be joking.'
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