Cunningham's challenge
Giannandrea Poesio
Merce Cunningham Dance Company Barbican
kick off a dance season with a big
name creates great expectations. And that can be dangerous. Yet risk-taking has long been a feature of Dance Umbrella's artistic policies, and a very successful one, too. Faithful to this tradition, this year's grand opening was yet another success: the splendid crowd-pulling performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company were anything but disappointing.
Fun is not a term frequently associated with art, and modern art in particular. Yet fun is what most dance-goers experienced at Dance Umbrella's opening night last week at the Barbican, especially in the first part of the evening. Created in 1965, How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run relies on the interaction between spoken words and dance action. The formula is an Old one, but it has not lost its impact. Seated on the left-hand side of the stage, Merce Cunningham and his biographer, the wellknown dance historian and writer David
Vaughan, delivered lines derived from stories by John Cage, while the dancers gave one of the most eye-catching and perfect renditions of what is normally, though restrictively, considered to be the Cunningham style. Indeed, the presence of the two speakers, whose performing brief is to narrate each story within a minute — regardless of its actual length — could be regarded as highly distracting. But a constant challenge to traditional dance-watching is fundamental to Cunningham's dance-making.
Indeed, one cannot help wondering whether the storytelling, carefully paced at times and quickly delivered in tonguetwisting fashion at others, would have been so central had it been delivered by less charismatic narrators. But even if the ears and the eyes mostly followed the pyrotechnics of Cunningham and Vaughan, speaking alone or in unison — evoking a sort of Gertrude Steinesque atmosphere — the action on stage was equally engaging. The viewer was able to switch from one to the other, in line with the purest precepts of post-modernism, with which Cunningham is often, erroneously, associated. After all, viewers had already been introduced to Cunningham's unique and thought-provoking approach to performance at the beginning of the evening, when the typically C:unningharnesque procedure of dicecasting (to decide which music should be performed, costumes worn and lighting used) was played by some of the most illustrious names of the dance and performing arts world — Siobhan Davies and Richard Alston were among the ones on stage on the opening night.
The electric atmosphere created by the presence of the 83-year-old choreographer did not wane in the second part, when the more recent Split Sides (2003), co-commissioned by BITE:04 Barbican, received its UK premiere. The new work was totally different from the one seen in the first part. The contrast, however, was not strident or unpleasant. On the contrary, it again emphasised how this creative genius can never be successfully pigeonholed.
Split Sides is indeed a work that might surprise those who love Cunningham for his continuous use of the chance factor, as well as for his challenges to the notions and conventions of theatre dance. Geometrical symmetries, a measured use of space. a web of now complementary, now colliding ideas and patterns, and fluidly juxtaposed lines contribute to the making of a work that is breathtakingly different from his usual distinctive dance-making. Although the principles of his choreographic style are still recognisable, his ideas for Split Sides are worked upon in a way that goes beyond recognisable traits. Some could object that Cunningham seems to have gone backwards in time and, more precisely, gone back to those principles of modern dance he himself wanted to break away from. Indeed, this can be the first impression. A few more minutes into the work, however, and one can see that there is no going back at all, and that the ideas that might look slightly dated are, in reality, the most up-to-date in his continual search for movement and visual possibilities. There could not have been a better grand opening, therefore, for a rich and highly intriguing season of modern and post-modern dance.
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