"Nearly Ninety"
Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, NY
April 16, 2009
Lisa Rinehart
Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Rinehart
It's not by chance that Merce Cunningham's "Nearly Ninety" is just under ninety minutes and premiered on Cunningham's 90th birthday, the day of BAM's Spring Gala. But aside from the Gala hoopla and nonagenarian fuss, "Nearly Ninety" is as provocative and powerful as any dance pulled from Cunningham's imagination. It doesn't turn any new creative corners -- that would be Cunningham's discovery of chance in the 1950's and later, at the tender age of eighty, his laptop compositions using the Life Forms computer technology -- but "Nearly Ninety" is a valid continuation of Cunningham's play with shapes, space and sound.
True confessions -- I didn't like Cunningham's work for a long time. The dancers seemed blank. The movement was awkward and repetitive. The divide between decor, choreography and music felt gimmicky. And the frequent use of nails-down-the-blackboard sound -- torture, I thought.
But, as with many things difficult to understand, the more I looked, the more I saw. "Nearly Ninety" is a case in point.
The music, composed and performed onstage by John Paul Jones, Takehisa Kosugi and Sonic Youth, is mostly loud and dissonant with screeching guitar, some moaning vocals and curious sounds created by a metal cookie sheet rigged with rubber bands and miscellaneous rolling pieces. It's actually pretty cool.
The musicians play from a series of platforms embedded in Benedetta Tagliabue's crunched up lunar landing module of a set which is, sadly, not so cool. A behemoth of metal grids, stairs to nowhere and mechanical moving parts, it feels clunkier and messier than one would like and often overwhelms the dancers.
The dancers, on the other hand, are elegant in swirled black and white unitards by Romeo Gigli. Gigli subtly changes the costumes, removing black as the piece progresses until the dancers are mostly in flesh tones with a tree-like spray of black on their chests. But the slowly evolving alterations in color and pattern encourage us to look closely. It feels like we're watching a Dali painting come alive.
Franc Aleu's sensual video design knits everything together with expansive projections of water, smoke and body parts on the move. Arching spouts of silvery liquid and wispy sheets of mistiness fill the stage's opening. A huge water droplet falls repeatedly, hits center stage and sends massive ripples outwards into the wings. A film of the dancers legs, upside down and ghostly white, plays high above the stage. The technology is mysterious and probably complex, but the effect is stunning.
Finally, there's Cunningham's movement that somehow looks fresh as ever. Backed by sound, set and video, adagio duets are visual pauses. We can linger on long, slow arches of the back or on the soft curves of a leg held bent and aloft until sharp lunges of the head downward or skittering steps coupled with rapid fire looks; right, left, right, left, agitate and confuse only to be quelled by another slow unfolding of body parts. We are never sure of what we are seeing and consequently, it's always interesting.
At the end of the performance, speakers from BAM, the Cunningham Foundation, the City of New York and the Cunningham Dance Company lauded and applauded Cunningham's phenomenal contribution to modern dance and indeed, to American culture.
Merce, looking dapper in a deep blue velvet suit, sat center stage in his wheelchair and took it all in with devilish bemusement. When it was his turn to speak, he acknowledged his early training at the Cornish School of the Arts and quoted his father who, when asked about his son's passion for dance, said, "That fellow - if he didn't have that dance game -- would be a crook!"
Lucky for us, Cunningham took the hard road.
Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Rinehart
