“CRWDSPCR,” “Quartet,” and “Antic Meet”
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
New York, NY
March 22, 2011
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2011 by Kathleen O’Connell
The program for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s final series of performances at the Joyce (the company's absolute final performances will be at the end of the year at the Park Avenue Armory) was something of a mini-retrospective of the great choreographer’s long career—minus the last two decades or so—taken in reverse chronological order. It reminded us of his range and did a bit of myth-busting besides. “CRWDSPCR,” a work from the early 90s, is the Cunningham we’ve come to expect: abstract, intricate, self-contained. “Quartet,” a work from the early 80s seemed explicitly, disconcertingly dramatic. Dramatic through line? Merce? And “Antic Meet,” a work from the 50s that hasn’t been seen in New York since 1969, proved to be less avant-garde than the iconic photos hinted that it might have been.
“CRWDSPCR” was among the earliest works that Cunningham choreographed with the assistance of computer animation software. Watching it, you can practically re-create his computer screen in your mind’s eye. The dancers’ bodies don’t look unnatural per se—there aren’t the mind-bending effects one finds in hip-hop, for instance—but you’re often reminded that you’re watching an emulation of an emulation, and one made with 20 year old software to boot.
Each part of the body is articulated in isolation and at its own rhythm with seeming indifference to what the other parts might be doing. (Mark Lancaster’s parti-colored unitards heighten the effect. No two limbs seem to be colored the same way.) Turns often look like static shapes rotated in space. There’s a lot of angular opposition—especially in the arms—and a relative paucity of torsion through the body. There isn’t a lot of flow and when a real start-to-finish step gets thrown into the mix, it startles the eye. It’s not the way a schooled body would naturally move, and that’s presumably the point.
Once your eye adjusts to the novelty, the movement isn’t particularly engrossing at the level of the individual dancer, although you marvel that they can do it. At the level of the ensemble, however, the stage shimmers with beautiful kaleidoscopic effects. Apparent chaos quickly yields to evident order. What looks like a dozen dancers doing wildly divergent things resolves into the viral propagation of a shared motif, which in turn resolves into small groups of dancers developing that motif, which resolves yet again into the entire ensemble taking up a final variation in unison.
The ensemble sections are interleaved with notable solos and duets that seem to double-underscore the difference between “natural” and computer-generated movement. In one, Emma Desjardins moved slowly down the diagonal in a series of linear reconfigurations that showed us the same shape from every direction. She stopped, her torso tilted and arms outstretched, and turned her head to the side in super slo-mo. It was a mesmerizing gesture, and a reminder of how video has changed our palette of movement.
“Quartet” was the most disconcerting work on the program because it reads like the kind of psychodrama Cunningham’s methods seem purpose-built to avoid. Cunningham’s works are famously objective and “contingent.” He incorporated chance procedures into his choreographic process—a coin toss, say, to determine which phrase would follow which—in an effort to detach movement from subjective expression. To that same end, he and his collaborators would develop a given work’s movement, music, and décor independently of each other, bringing them together only at the time of performance. Movement and sound shared time and space, but not expressive intent. Any resonances between them were coincidental.
But “Quartet” seems so intentional in its dramatic effects that it’s hard to believe that its music, décor, and choreography came together by chance. In the context of Cunningham’s oeuvre, the work’s disquieting images seem so personal that looking at them feels like a violation of privacy. It would take superhuman—no, make that non-human—objectivity to see them and not feel pity and terror.
David Tudor’s soundscape—an eerie collection of processed rumbles, hums, crackles, and whooshes—conspires with Mark Lancaster’s crepuscular lighting to locate the dance in a desolate liminal space somewhere on the corner of being and nothingness. Four of the work’s five dancers—three women and a man—are luminous with potent ease. They skim the stage with quicksilver turns and release their supple limbs into sweeping battements. But the fifth—a role Cunningham made for himself when he was 63—is isolated and bent with infirmity.
He sees the quartet; they seem oblivious to him. They curl into a tender heap like a litter of puppies; he inches his way towards them, rising to his knees and toppling to the side again and again, but never reaches them. Two of them join hands in a circle around him and hurtle across the stage; he waves his arms in panic as if it were a moment of mortal peril. He lumbers forward, pawing at the air with quavering hands, as if he were swatting away hallucinations. When he finally vanishes from the stage, the quartet’s movement is reduced to tiny, stiff-limbed pivots in place.
“Like” ... “Seem” ... “As if”... How odd it feels to apply the language of simile to a Cunningham work. Odder still is the urge to layer a story—about age, about isolation, about what happens to the world we’ve made when we die—onto the movement. But no matter how many times you roll the dice with the work’s loaded vocabulary, the result will be the same.
Robert Swinston, who joined the company in 1980 and is now its Director of Choreography, has taken on this role and his uncanny emulation of the aged and arthritic Cunningham’s crooked shuffle was chilling.
“Antic Meet” is to Cunningham what “The Concert” is to Jerome Robbins, except that Robbins’ comic ballet wasn’t put in mothballs for 40 years. The work is often billed as “absurdist” and its props “dadaist,” but forget the labels: like “The Concert,” it’s a sweet-tempered send-up in which the jokes are funny even if you know next-to-nothing about dance and wickedly funny if you know a little bit more. There’s no reason that “Antic Meet” couldn’t be the kind of popular audience favorite that “The Concert” is. Even Cage’s score would be no barrier: it’s disarmingly loopy to begin with and grows even more so in the context of the jokes onstage.
Cunningham’s targets are many. In the work’s most famous episode, psychic toll of the protagonist’s attempt to don a sweater with four arms but no neck-hole is made manifest by the Grahamesque histrionics of a chorus of fierce Bacchantes draped in parachute silk. (Robert Rauschenberg did the costumes and props.) In another, a cavalier gallantly offers his ballerina a seat on the chair he carries strapped to his back so she can rest for a spell. There’s a send-up of circus acrobats and another of competitive ballerinas trying to take each other out during class.
It was impossible not to wonder what will happen to these works once the company shuts down at the end of this year. It’s easy to imagine “Antic Meet” finding a home: it’s funny, it’s full of the kind of icons that audiences like to see brought to life, and its style should be within the reach of many professional companies. Many audiences would enjoy “Quartet,” too, although there’s the risk that in the wrong hands it could degenerate into an angsty, stylized re-enactment of “Mondays with Merce.”
But will we ever have a chance to see the remarkable “CRWDSPCR” again? It would take deep pockets to fund the rehearsal time needed to school a big ensemble in the intricacies of its particular style—to “sing Merce’s rhythm” as former Cunningham dancer Kimberly Bartosik once put it—but it would be worth every dime.
copyright © 2011 by Kathleen O’Connell
Photos by Yi-Chun Wu
Top: The Merce Cunningham Dance Company in “Quartet”
Bottom: The Merce Cunningham Dance Company in “Antic Meet”
Each part of the body is articulated in isolation and at its own rhythm with seeming indifference to what the other parts might be doing. (Mark Lancaster’s parti-colored unitards heighten the effect. No two limbs seem to be colored the same way.) Turns often look like static shapes rotated in space. There’s a lot of angular opposition—especially in the arms—and a relative paucity of torsion through the body. There isn’t a lot of flow and when a real start-to-finish step gets thrown into the mix, it startles the eye. It’s not the way a schooled body would naturally move, and that’s presumably the point.
Once your eye adjusts to the novelty, the movement isn’t particularly engrossing at the level of the individual dancer, although you marvel that they can do it. At the level of the ensemble, however, the stage shimmers with beautiful kaleidoscopic effects. Apparent chaos quickly yields to evident order. What looks like a dozen dancers doing wildly divergent things resolves into the viral propagation of a shared motif, which in turn resolves into small groups of dancers developing that motif, which resolves yet again into the entire ensemble taking up a final variation in unison.
The ensemble sections are interleaved with notable solos and duets that seem to double-underscore the difference between “natural” and computer-generated movement. In one, Emma Desjardins moved slowly down the diagonal in a series of linear reconfigurations that showed us the same shape from every direction. She stopped, her torso tilted and arms outstretched, and turned her head to the side in super slo-mo. It was a mesmerizing gesture, and a reminder of how video has changed our palette of movement.
“Quartet” was the most disconcerting work on the program because it reads like the kind of psychodrama Cunningham’s methods seem purpose-built to avoid. Cunningham’s works are famously objective and “contingent.” He incorporated chance procedures into his choreographic process—a coin toss, say, to determine which phrase would follow which—in an effort to detach movement from subjective expression. To that same end, he and his collaborators would develop a given work’s movement, music, and décor independently of each other, bringing them together only at the time of performance. Movement and sound shared time and space, but not expressive intent. Any resonances between them were coincidental.
But “Quartet” seems so intentional in its dramatic effects that it’s hard to believe that its music, décor, and choreography came together by chance. In the context of Cunningham’s oeuvre, the work’s disquieting images seem so personal that looking at them feels like a violation of privacy. It would take superhuman—no, make that non-human—objectivity to see them and not feel pity and terror.
David Tudor’s soundscape—an eerie collection of processed rumbles, hums, crackles, and whooshes—conspires with Mark Lancaster’s crepuscular lighting to locate the dance in a desolate liminal space somewhere on the corner of being and nothingness. Four of the work’s five dancers—three women and a man—are luminous with potent ease. They skim the stage with quicksilver turns and release their supple limbs into sweeping battements. But the fifth—a role Cunningham made for himself when he was 63—is isolated and bent with infirmity.
He sees the quartet; they seem oblivious to him. They curl into a tender heap like a litter of puppies; he inches his way towards them, rising to his knees and toppling to the side again and again, but never reaches them. Two of them join hands in a circle around him and hurtle across the stage; he waves his arms in panic as if it were a moment of mortal peril. He lumbers forward, pawing at the air with quavering hands, as if he were swatting away hallucinations. When he finally vanishes from the stage, the quartet’s movement is reduced to tiny, stiff-limbed pivots in place.
“Like” ... “Seem” ... “As if”... How odd it feels to apply the language of simile to a Cunningham work. Odder still is the urge to layer a story—about age, about isolation, about what happens to the world we’ve made when we die—onto the movement. But no matter how many times you roll the dice with the work’s loaded vocabulary, the result will be the same.
Robert Swinston, who joined the company in 1980 and is now its Director of Choreography, has taken on this role and his uncanny emulation of the aged and arthritic Cunningham’s crooked shuffle was chilling.
Cunningham’s targets are many. In the work’s most famous episode, psychic toll of the protagonist’s attempt to don a sweater with four arms but no neck-hole is made manifest by the Grahamesque histrionics of a chorus of fierce Bacchantes draped in parachute silk. (Robert Rauschenberg did the costumes and props.) In another, a cavalier gallantly offers his ballerina a seat on the chair he carries strapped to his back so she can rest for a spell. There’s a send-up of circus acrobats and another of competitive ballerinas trying to take each other out during class.
It was impossible not to wonder what will happen to these works once the company shuts down at the end of this year. It’s easy to imagine “Antic Meet” finding a home: it’s funny, it’s full of the kind of icons that audiences like to see brought to life, and its style should be within the reach of many professional companies. Many audiences would enjoy “Quartet,” too, although there’s the risk that in the wrong hands it could degenerate into an angsty, stylized re-enactment of “Mondays with Merce.”
But will we ever have a chance to see the remarkable “CRWDSPCR” again? It would take deep pockets to fund the rehearsal time needed to school a big ensemble in the intricacies of its particular style—to “sing Merce’s rhythm” as former Cunningham dancer Kimberly Bartosik once put it—but it would be worth every dime.
copyright © 2011 by Kathleen O’Connell
Photos by Yi-Chun Wu
Top: The Merce Cunningham Dance Company in “Quartet”
Bottom: The Merce Cunningham Dance Company in “Antic Meet”