“Roaratorio”
Merce Cunningham Dance Company: The Legacy Tour
The Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, New York
December 7, 2011
By Michael Popkin
Copyright ©2011 by Michael Popkin
Cunningham’s “Roaratorio,” based on John Cage’s “Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake,” took Joyce’s nearly unintelligible and completely unrestrained prose and turned it into lucidly beautiful, orderly and restrained theater. Cage, reciting the 2,500 (or so) place names in Joyce’s novel over a sound track of roaring of water, street sounds, babbling voices and background noises all shot through with the faint melody of a fiddle playing a Celtic reel, first made Joyce’s words audible. Cunningham made them flesh.
The costumes were attractive leotards and tee shirts in pale pastels – grey, yellowish or mauve - but everyone added touches of stronger colors (red, purple, orange, green, etc.) in asymmetrical accessories like leg warmers, sweat bands, anklets or other garments that completed their outfits. The clothes streamlined the body’s lines and rendered them lyrical but also carried forward the idea that these were contemporary dancers, spontaneously and informally reacting to steps and music.
The score’s cacophony of sound ebbed and flowed, but was always unified by the background Gaelic reel. Cunningham styled a parallel version of a jig to pull his composition together. The dancers stamped or hopped on a single leg, springing repeatedly into and out of the step. Demonstrated in the beginning by individuals and small groups of performers, soon the others joined in, and the recurring high points of the piece had the entire cast doing it in infectiously rhythmic group variations: Cunningham’s equivalent of the national dances in more traditional dance theater. The group dances alternated with solos and small ensembles in Cunningham’s more typical style – weighty distortions of the dancers’ basic postures, conscious and obvious realignments of the spine or of the dancers’ balances.
Another unforgettable sequence towards the conclusion had Scott first arranging colored cloths on the stools before the rest of the cast filed in by twos to dance the ghost of a tango. But this time you were acutely aware that this was the company’s last visit to BAM, that you probably would never see this transcendentally beautiful masterpiece danced again, and that it was like a tango at a very quiet requiem.
It worked. The dancers and Cunningham’s response to the music had forged a link: this score, these steps, this stage in downtown Brooklyn, these beautiful people onstage in these costumes, the rainy night outside, and soon the audience on the subway platforms heading home - aware that they’d just seen nearly an act of god and yet something entirely and routinely human. That’s Merce.
Photos of Merce Cunningham Dance Company in "Roaratorio" by Julieta Cervantes:
Top: Company
Left Below: Dylan Crossman and Company
Right Below: Melissa Toogood, Krista Nelson and Silas Riener
Left Below: Jamie Scott and Robert Swinston
Bottom: Jamie Scott and Company