On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance IN THE AGE OF CUNNINGHAM BY LAURA A. JACOBS No matter how many dance concerts you attend in the course of a year, when you go to see Merce Cunningham you're always starting over....
...So does his penchant for Satie...
...Individual motions recapitulate the circular motif, from the round-the-world hip swivels to the clocksweeps of the legs, and the dancers' arms often curve and meet at the fingers to make large o's...
...In his Concerto Six Twenty-Two, unveiled last summer, he has clearly broken through...
...in another each runs diagonally across the stage...
...Macbeth and Banquo are yuppie businessmen...
...he tends to hear the obvious...
...Certainly the traditional properties of classicismsymmetry, balance, a sense of faith embodied in technique-are attenuated by Cunningham to bat-squeak levels of perception...
...this season it was added to the repertory...
...These are admittedly easy shots, but Comfort's pacing and deft touch make it all eminently enjoyable...
...just as refreshing as the first time...
...We don't know which parts of the dance are his and which issue from the roll of the dice...
...Almost...
...The choreography of the opening Allegro is based on a grand circle, with the dancers constantly separating off, only to reintegrate themselves later...
...Septet was not made for seven dancers, but for six-three womenandthreemen...
...When the dancers aren't speaking the Bard's lines or spouting from the Cliffs Notes, they talk in coffee-achiever lingo...
...The mood is happy and Utopian...
...Cunningham forces notunderstanding upon us...
...When Six Twenty- Two was first presented during a Mostly Mozart concert at Avery Fisher Hall, the Adagio stopped the show, literally, for almost 10 minutes...
...Its serious theme contrasts perfectly with the Allegro's pleasant lightheartedness, revived in the closing rondo movement...
...The lighting is deep-sea blue...
...Septet, by contrast, is a pristine affair, full of airy imaginings...
...Although Septet's serendipitous mood embraces and sweetens what follows, there are some disorienting moments...
...We feel waves crashing, sense mermaid mirages and men going down to their deaths in the sea...
...We will miss her magnificence...
...The most sophisticated dancegoer is suddenly a neophyte...
...As a silly Sea World song about a killer whale named Sarah plays, she begins swaying and swiveling in wave-like rolls...
...We fall in love with her, too...
...Indeed, sometimes she looks a little like Atlas out there, she's so resolute...
...Whether or not the dances are classical is open to question...
...Carlson walks out in spike heels and a shimmering blue strapless dress with a ruffled peplum...
...Billed as a "deconstruction," the dance is really more of a teasingly inventive reduction...
...The dance has become a signature piece and showstopper for Lubovitch's company, as is Treading for Elisa Monte or Revelations for Alvin Ailey...
...Either way, Quartet was about endings...
...The Adagio features a pas de deux portraying the friendship, or love, between two men...
...Lubovitch is not the most musically sophisticated choreographer...
...A choreographer in the post-Cunningham era had better think twice before falling back on the old build-climaxcoda structure that used to send 'em home happy...
...From our present perspective we can see hints in Septet of entrenched conventions breaking apart...
...When the curtain goes up, the three women are positioned downstage, each in a sturdy but slightly skewed pose...
...It's hard to know whether these tableaux are the precursors of the "still lives" that would later turn up so resonantly in a work like Pictures, orif they're mock-heroic, the makings of a faux ballet ("heroicism" as well can be discerned in sequences for three women and a man, obvious allusions to George Balanchine's Apollo...
...All three dances are classics without quite being masterpieces, in which the respective creators' strengths are buttressed, in a positive way, by their weaknesses...
...You think of delicately turned Orientalia...
...Three months later at the "Dancing for Life" AIDS benefit, which raised $1.4 million, the Adagio was again the high point of theevening, crystallizing everything the benefit stood for...
...That doesn' t happen to me with the music of other composers that I have listened to-I find very quickly that I begin to know the formal procedures, and it doesn't hold my interest...
...The score for Six Twenty- Two, Mozart's clarinet concerto, conveys apowerful sense of containment, and Lubovitch has keyed into it...
...In Doubles, Cunningham's work about adagio dancing, Kerr has the opening solo, and she shows us how many things a Cunningham dancer can be at once: meditative, explosive, distant, implacable, empowered...
...It is as though Comfort extracted a handful of Shakespeare's most magnetic unes, plopped them into a contemporary vacuum, and then simply allowed a great mass of '80s clichés and accouterment to get sucked into their force field...
...His own strategies rob us of ours, thereby keeping his dances fresher, newer, richer, longer...
...Choreographed to Erik Satie's "Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear" for piano, Septet stays with the music...
...In the Adagio, however, he listens with heightened subtlety, and the audience responds...
...Yetthewaythey are grouped on stage, more often in threes and fours than in couples, beguiles us into believing we really are watching a septet (I thought so until I looked at the program...
...The quality of Satie's music remains mysterious and not quite definable," Cunningham has commented, "andhisformal-his structural-inventions are interesting...
...We see the woman in the whale and vice versa...
...Cunningham's refusal to leave the performance space empty and dead in these intervals foreshadows the more radical departures that were to come in his career...
...Lady Macbeth: "You can do it, be it, but youhave to want it, go for it...
...If in the end we have learned nothing new of Macbeth's psychology-yuppies have yet to be tragic-we never grow aweary of the fun...
...At the opening night performance of the Cunningham Company's March run at New York's Joyce Theater, a critic known for her fearless opinions confided, "I still don't think I really understand these dances...
...This doubt undermines our interpretive hypotheses, shadowing the path ahead...
...In a mysterious, maddening way his dances defy time-tested strategies for taking a work in, weighing it, judging it...
...In fact, he so clearly marks a divide in the history of dance that critics long ago began using the term "postCunningham" to connote the divorce of movement from standard time-frames, flamboyant means and Western music...
...Lubovitch has made the pas de deux a stunning mix of tenderness and physicality, endowing it with clean sculptural lines that build to some daring leaps and catches...
...Like Satie, Cunningham has striven to subvert stale formalism by confronting his audience with the perennially unexpected...
...Capable, incredibly strong, hungry for space yet confident where she stands, Kerr is the kind of dancer who can carry a company...
...I have called her a lioness before, and that still seeems to sum her up best...
...Then, her mouth a thin line, she whips her leg up à la seconde, her foot curving like a talon, and holds it there, a thunderbolt she's decided not to hurl...
...An astonishing creation...
...If this work reminds us of perils we may go to the theater to forget, it does so in a mood of Mozartean complicity-without fear or anger or regret...
...How about Swan Lake next...
...The three witches are punk-rockers...
...Cunningham's notorious use of chance, mathematical formula and I Ching divination in the arrangement of his step sequences seemed willful and arrogant at first...
...Rather than stealing fire from the gods, Cunningham borrows shafts of moonlight...
...There the title's implications were on the somber side: The choreographer's presence at the conclusion could be interpreted as a bodiless auteur finally materializing inside his own creation, or an aging dancer refusing to quit the stage...
...Don't anticipate the shape of the dance," Cunningham says in effect, "watch what it's doing now...
...With one far-fetched metaphor Carlson has made a dance linking anthropomorphism, objectification, myth, and pop culture...
...It's frightening...
...Lubovitch is a choreographer who works in a rough-and-tumble vein similar to Paul Taylor's, but who rarely gets below the surface of things...
...The banquet where Macbeth breaks down is presented as a Tom Wolfeian orgy of social-climbing...
...Though I'm not crazy about the way the dancers scoop up imaginary butterflies-too Walt Disneyish-the gesture does not detract from Six Twenty-Two's prevailing atmosphere of divine animation...
...Then she hauls off and blows the audience a kiss, as the song instructs, and the metamorphosis is complete...
...Decades later, paradoxically, we read this as a frank disavowal of hubris...
...Consider the title...
...No other choreographer throws you back on your resources the way he does...
...That's what gives his works the stark, large-scale purity many people like to call classicism...
...And we do, never knowing when the curtain will come down...
...In one the dancers all shake hands in silence...
...It looks traditional...
...You rarely see a dance like this for men...
...a goldfish swims in a round bowl on a pedestal...
...The two principals in the Adagio dance on firm ground, perhaps a plateau, while the others cavort in surrounding cumulus clouds...
...In Cunningham's Locale, also presented at the Joyce, Kerr took the stage in hot-pink and steel-gray leotards, eyes flashing like an empress...
...Jane Comfort also deserves note for her jazzy Cliffs Notes: Macbeth...
...Last year Cunningham's 1953 Septet was revived for a single hot-ticket performance...
...Cunningham has brought some interesting new performers into his company recently, but it was hard to watch anyone except Catherine Kerr this season-especially because it is said to be her last...
...The zenith was undoubtedly Ann Carlson's solo Sarah, a work that in the space of ten minutes sees the performer transformed from torch singer to ondine to orca...
...Kerr is large-framed and solidly muscled, with a surprisingly fineboned face and noncommittal expression -decidedlyno sylph...
...The winter season at New York's Dance Theater Workshop was a varied one...
...Soon Carlson begins to emit strange, high-pitched, ululating sounds...
...Cunningham continues the dance oddly during the pauses between the musical sections, for instance...
...This typical Cunningham sleight-ofhand recalls a more recent dance for five, Quartet...
...The dance has the special distinction of tracing its origin to the year Cunningham founded his company...
...In March, too, the City Center featured a series of performances by the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company...
...She looked beautiful...
...The gravity of that pelvis as it ballasts an arabesque of awesome length and scale-a Suzanne Farrell arabesque-takes your breath away...
Vol. 71 • April 1988 • No. 6
