The Cunningham Enigma

...Interestingly, the least successful of this season's Events were those with scores that were in some sense literal, like the plaintive chants of Meredith Monk or Jim Burton's torch song and elephant jokes...

...Changing circles of dancers tore about the stage and disappeared into the curtain as unobtrusively as they had emerged from it, leaving only Cunningham behind...

...When they began to move, most often in unison, Cunningham followed behind like a teacher, sometimes brusquely separating them from each other, mimicking them with gentle humor...

...His influence and sheer staying power have earned him a place in the modern dance establishment, yet many still consider him avant-garde...

...Christian Wolff's score alternates silence and soft piano fragments...

...Despite the anonymity the piece encourages, some of the dancers did stand out, particularly the men...

...Cunningham is now in his 50s, and Chris Komar has begun to take on some of his roles in the company...

...The feel of this 1959 dance is grayly cerebral, like the work of a man immersed in concept...

...In the program notes for his Events, he describes the 90-minute, intermission-less performances as "complete dances, excerpts of dances from the repertory, and often new sequences arranged for the particular performance and place, with the possibility of several separate activities happening at the same time, to allow for, not so much an evening of dances as the experience of dance...

...According to Cunningham, his present company had less trouble learning "Rune," designed to be performed in any order of sequences, than did the original cast...

...The chance came at Princeton's McCarter Theater in mid-January, when Cunningham presented repertory to the New York area audience for the first time in four years...

...The same might be said of Cunningham...

...Thanks to his innovations, internal body rhythms or counts now frequently replace musical meter in guiding dancers, and his current troupe is highly proficient at maintaining them...

...It is not for unsteady souls...

...But while isolating and mixing different segments like this can be revealing, at times one longs to see the works whole...

...He performed an eccentric solo and then returned to his starting point, the rack of street clothes...

...what to some seems barren, to others is the very essence of the heroic...

...Metaphor distracts...

...Each included tantalizing glimpses of new and old dances...

...Pinpoints of light from the skyscrapers beyond one bank of windows blur into a reflected glow on the polished dance floor...

...Pews that line one wall are filled and spectators have replaced potted plants on the window sills...

...Parts of the new dances were so familiar from past Events that the viewer had a strong sense of recognition...

...At the McCarter, Komar was a king of manic leitmotif as he spilled through crowds of dancers...

...the musicians, tucked into one corner of the room, begin to play...

...It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that since 1964 when he began working in the form, Cunningham seems to have favored the "Event" for presenting dance...

...Pursuing his private, matter-of-fact dance process, Merce Cunningham will no doubt continue to exasperate and dazzle...

...The revival of "Rune" at Princeton was less accessible...

...Among the premieres was "Torse.' Set to an electronic score of gray noise by Maryanne Amach-er, this is one of Cunningham's most overtly balletic dances, looking at times like a classroom exercise...

...Cunningham's dancers have formidable technique and control, yet one occasionally misses the expressive eccentricity of the older performers who have left the company...

...even in the self-contained repertory pieces it is seldom directed...

...They are not framed by the stage or performing space: The dancers engage in equally important activities everywhere, and their movement lacks the building quality of traditional, linear dance...

...This feeling of lineage was implicit as well in the eerie but very moving "Rebus...

...None of the hierarchical ordering of groups and soloists inherent in ballet is to be found in "Torse" either...

...You have to love dancing to stick to it," Cunningham wrote in Changes...

...One pas de deux seemed a kind of ballet tease: A man burst into a staccato frenzy as his partner calmly stretched and extended her leg in space...

...Individuals asserted themselves only briefly, in ducts and trios...

...And Charlie Moulton brought a fresh-faced ex-pansiveness to the intensity of the proceedings...

...Dancers entered, dressed in white leotards and tights, sleeves edged in innocent pastel colors...

...Set to an electronic score by David Behrman, "Rebus" opened with a motionless Cunningham, in an unattractively loose-fitting shirt and trousers, gazing at a clothing rack...

...There is a thud of heels as the dancers file past, silhouetted briefly, ankles and waists bulky with warm-up clothing, and then disappear into a tiny alcove overlooking the performance space...

...But while the sense of form is classical, the onstage activity is unballetically continuous and fast-paced until the ending—a typically intriguing use of stillness that has the five dancers left on stage suddenly stop and the curtain fall...

...The lights come up...

...The entire company (save Cunningham) appeared in the work, largely in blocks of moving bodies, and dancers hurled themselves across the stage in relentless, albeit tidy wedges...

...He had a moment of solo dance, followed by a final, small flurry of compact traveling turns that shot him down the stage and through the curtain...

...This can be difficult work...

...his notion is of an ongoing process, not a series of "finished objects...

...The two evenings at McCarter provided a kind of mini-survey of his work: Several pieces were "resurrected and pinched,' and new ones were unveiled...

...For next season, a week of repertory at a mid-Manhattan theater is being tentatively planned, and there will be a minimum of six Events at the Cunningham Studio in Westbeth...

...It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but the single fleeting moment when you feel alive...

...The dancers disappeared and suddenly Cunningham disrobed and stood revealed in bright red leotard and tights...

...Yet despite the difficulty and complexity of his work, Cunningham's appearances this season were sold out and his studio was usually jammed...

...Robert Kovich's fluid jumps were remarkable and understated...

...Through it all Cunningham has persisted, opening up and continuing to mine the possibilities of dance as pure, abstract movement...

...There was a poignancy to that ending, a suggestion that Cunningham remains a father-creator...

...From a vantage point to the side and slightly above the performance space, meanwhile, fleeting patterns can be observed in a newly vivid way, like looking at a familiar room from atop a ladder...

...Indeed, prolonged exposure to Cunningham's Events can radically change the way one habitually approaches dance...

...As he himself wrote: "What to some is spendid entertainment, to others is merely tedium and fidgets...

...The inevitability of its noise immediately pulled one into the cyclical turbulence of the dance, as the performers tumbled onto the stage through a slit in Mark Lancaster's long, low curtain...

...Merce Cunningham—iconoclast, charlatan or uncompromising purist —remains something of an enigma after 30 years of ohoreographing and performing...

...His works are free from the personal and historical contexts, the dramatic and emotional connotations of the modern dance tradition he sprang from...

...The best characterization of him is probably still the one critic John Martin came up with in 1953 when he somewhat testily dubbed him an "advanced simplicist...

...Your eye has to judge," Cunningham explains...

...And the art is not the better or the worse...

...It was a brilliant piece of staging...

...Watching a Cunningham Event, one also makes one's own dances...

...He invites artists and musicians to create decor and scores totally unrelated to the choreography...

...He even uses such "found" compositional techniques as determining the positions of his dancers, or the sequence of a performance by chance...

...In contrast to "Rune," "Sound-dance"—along with "Rebus," performed for the first time in the East —is an exciting, non-stop dance set to an almost unbearably loud, churning electronic score by David Tudor...

...But something seems to have been lost in the process...

...At times the tempo of the dance slowed to near stillness, as faceless individuals pulled away from the group and returned...

...Cunningham's dances do not, as Wallace Stevens wrote, suffer from evasion by comfortable metaphor...

...As for his feelings about the more traditional concept of repertory, in his book Changes: Notes on Choreography, he wrote: "I suspect that this interest in repertory is fundamentally unsound that mass of pieces lying around waiting to be resurrected and pinched, seems anything but essential.' This season, Cunningham offered 12 Events at his Westbeth studio and six as part of the Roundabout Theater's Dance Umbrella series...

...Merce Cunningham and his dancers scatter onto the floor, solemn and alert, arms spread aloft as if for flight, legs stretched and feet pointed as if for ballet...

...The scores, which are not heard by the dancers until performance time, are contributed by a roster of composers, including John Cage and Nam June Paik...

...In both instances close proximity magnifies the problem of simply where to focus...

...From many of the 100-odd places in his studio, the viewer is seated at eye level or on the floor, and with the dancers only a few feet away he is plunged into the immediacy of movement...