On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance CUNNINGHAM'S DEBT TO KANDINSKY BY LAURA A. JACOBS By a fruitful coincidence, Vas-ily Kandinsky's Paris oeuvre was the focus of a show at New York's Guggenheim Museum not long ago while...
...But Cunningham achieves his goal: He magnifies where the dance is rather than where it's going...
...Dressed identically, the three sets of pairs suggested Doppelgangers, and in the context of the music I thought of tribal Shamans and afterlife...
...Look closer and there is more here...
...Three women in white leotards and skirts—microflecked by a shower of tiny staple-shapes to camouflage them against the white, similarly patterned backdrop—move together in a triangle, male partners to the rear...
...Cunningham uses more telling movements than usual: A dancer wings her arms in flight, and a second throws her head back in abandon...
...Possessing a science-fiction flavor, the piece advances toward increasingly firm ground...
...At the conclusion of Native Green, when the drums get going and movement becomes fast and ecstatically intense, two of the men run to the back of the stage and pull up a section of fat, gray rubber hosing...
...and Cunningham, somehow bound up in its darkness, may be the closing hand of eternal night...
...Quartetis all howling winds, cavernous lighting, passionate impulses, and violent urges...
...Cunningham's troupe looked very fine this season...
...Nonetheless affinities exist...
...and his dances, I might add, are frequently accompanied by music that would enchant canines...
...Linked up, the counterbalancing chains and crowded pediments become luxurious bodily designs that warp out into wonderfully various, elegant, self-supporting structures in a disconcerting "return to go...
...Moreover, both men have an eye for receding geometries and tilted, high-tension skylines—a literal reading that Cunningham's dances invite, much as they invite narrative and metaphorical ones...
...I happened to see the Kandinsky exhibit, consisting of paintings, pencil drafts and gouaches from his last decade, 1934-44, on the same day Cunningham opened...
...At least two on this season's program, Quartets and Pictures, are masterpieces, and many of the rest are important...
...The men soon join and each pair goes its own way, often overlapping with the others in phrase or occasionally dominating the foreground for a moment itself...
...Cunningham's dances, tied to human bodies, are slower moving at their most mercurial...
...Both men are committed to a scrupulous detection of place, no matter how intangible...
...I have to admit that upon first seeing Native Green I misread the notes and thought it was the recentDoubles...
...Although the couples promenade across the stage in traditional waltz steps and turns, they connect oddly: One pair seemed to link arms, but in fact merely crossed them in the air, a vaguely disturbing gesture implying that something in the ritual of courtship has been lost forever...
...Special mention must be made of that lioness of a dancer, Catherine Kerr...
...Two women with the stride of Assyrian temple guardians transport us to a vanished empire...
...It snaps into the air and floats—a great Kandinskian loop...
...Cunningham's eye for inner balance, like the painter's, is as acute as a dog's ear for high pitches...
...the willful, frighteningly strong Susan Quinn Young...
...The two artists use similar forms...
...the dreamily malleable Megan Walker...
...If no less exacting in his standard than Kandinsky, Cunningham is a more evasive auteur...
...I contemplate them now because Cunningham, too, is an artist who has entered his late period...
...Cunningham's works are irreducible...
...Its "pictures," a la Kandinsky, are essentially configurations of dancers coalescing or crystallizing almost accidentally...
...Such gargoylesque poses, physically strained but smoothly outlined, are erotic couplings in spirit if not in letter...
...Kandinsky fashions biomorphic pods and oblongs into absurd little toys...
...1922) are hardly contemporaries, nor am I aware that Cunningham has acknowledged the painter as an influence...
...1866) and Cunningham (b...
...Cunningham's dancers are usually costumed in bold solids that encourage interpretations of form, not content...
...Often he employs dancers as objects to punctuate or square off or flesh out spatial perimeters, a technique that recalls the air bubbles, squiggles and amorphous fillips Kandinsky transforms into ineffable grams on his invisible scale...
...Cunningham himself dances in many pieces, but the limitations of age and injury isolate him physically—a predicament actively confronted in Quartet (1982), where he is a mysterious fifth element...
...The very openness, oropen-endedness, of his creations is what gives audiences difficulty and makes critics resist explaining them, but they are not at all random...
...Some coincidences drop as happily as Newton's apple...
...In time, however, his palette of brights begins to look like a foil for his remote and deeply contemplative background colors (cornea pinks, artichoke-heart lavenders, lichen grays, and all manner of underside greens), whose delicacy and painstaking muted-ness give the paintings their special quality...
...Kandinsky (b...
...At one point the music is reminiscent of construction in a jungle or of bats squeaking in trees, but ultimately it progresses to some very hot-blooded drumming, all turbulence and toucans...
...John King's score is a collection of teeming squeaks, shrills and moans straddling the natural and technological worlds...
...this is where they converge...
...The choreographer's most striking arrangements actually stun us into reorganizing our sense of symmetry...
...He is in control and, simultaneously, losing his grip...
...We may be adrift in these dances, but we are never lost at sea...
...as with a nipped two-color negative, left foreground later appears in the right background—the first hint of a higher consciousness at work in the dance...
...Late Kandinsky is decidedly more Aldous Huxley than Shakespeare...
...What we take in is a different species of weights and measures...
...On Dance CUNNINGHAM'S DEBT TO KANDINSKY BY LAURA A. JACOBS By a fruitful coincidence, Vas-ily Kandinsky's Paris oeuvre was the focus of a show at New York's Guggenheim Museum not long ago while blocks away the Merce Cunningham Dance company was having an especially glorious two-week season at the City Center...
...Why apply conventional values in a brave new world...
...His imagination is childlike, whimsical and mocking (I suspect the multitude of shapes resembling shields, military bars and semaphor flags are a private comment on the evils of nationalism), and yet it is stern and exacting to a still greater degree...
...The dance begins with a disarmingly simple design...
...Some of the tableaux reverse themselves...
...we see this sense of place in the most exciting of the season's three premieres, Native Green...
...The dancers come mesmerically to it and cling there, opiated at the communal lung, as a drill-hammer drives through the darkening stage...
...I saw Pictures perhaps four times before noticing that as the first chain links diagonally, its topography resembling a mountainscape, one woman icily rotates her head to face the opposite direction...
...His technique takes classical ballet steps and treats them as though they were turtle eggs: They are dropped, rolled, hidden, hard-boiled, cracked open...
...Few dance masters set foot on such slippery terrain, let alone inhabit it...
...Com-positionally, for example, Cunningham's Duets parallels Kandinsky's Sky Blue: Individual couples perform separate movement themes, and when they eventually crowd together on the stage each duet, an ingenious filagree of muscle, remains locked in its own elipse of space...
...and the voluptuous, touchingly serious newcomer Kristy Santimyer...
...Indeed, a long look at the Paris paintings gives you the impression that they might pop back to the immaculate world of quantum physics...
...A continuing theme does not figure as an alter ego to these dances as, say, those of a classical order or the enthralling muse often do in Balanchine's ballets...
...Pictures (1984) is sufficiently full of curves and horns to seem lush, yet might also be called Spartan, astringent: With catlike succinctness it spins out a series of ravishing, marbelized images and energized tableaux to David Behrman's score of deepening organ drones and spiring Hindu scales—a high-oxygen dance that has oriental equilibrium...
...you can't separate intellectual concerns from the fluid, achingly specific plotting of movement...
...Kandinsky elevates the undertone, and it in turn holds together his odd villages, his leaps in material logic...
...Toward the end you really start seeing things: Two women glide across the stage in air-eating attitudes, bodies aslant, arms piercing up and out —then, suddenly, they are long-legged birds lifting over a lake, all fine tensile beauty...
...Kandinsky's attention to detail, for instance, is almost unnerving: The pencil sketch of the large oil, Accompanied Center, is so rigorous it could be the blueprint of some futuristic city in a larval stage...
...Cunningham's thick curves and long, irretrievable linear threads create the bone structure of his work...
...he turns embryos into Trojan helmets...
...It wasn't a bad mistake...
...As for Cunningham himself, I can't think of another contemporary choreographer who could pull off the tube stunt, making it into a ghostly prophecy as well as an unforgettable dance image...
...Kandinsky's works speak to us eagerly even when obscure...
...Romanticism, modernism, impressionism, and a sort of nihilism, dominate periodically, but no one of them reigns...
...Tempestuous and pedantic at once, the Paris opus reveals a visionary zeal and poetically evaporating horizons, coupled with and telescoped by a scientist's feeling for structural continuity...
...Itis harder to talk about Cunningham's "vision": His subjects are unassertive —they defy topical or, really, aesthetic identification...
...The movement is a masterstroke that sounds the depths of the dance, further dislocating the picture from the pictorial...
...Likewise Kandinsky employs gay, en-amelesque temperas to color his anxious, animated doodles...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 5
