Image from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company
The Paramount was awash with local dance professionals in the audience Saturday night, for the final performance here of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour. It will wind up in New York the end of December, when the company disbands for good.
This was the second of two programs presented here, with one relatively early, one middle career, and one late sample of his choreographic genius. And genius it was, from the very beginning.
Saturday’s program showed the connections and close attention to detail in all aspects of Cunningham’s dances, not just movement, but also the sound—often it wasn’t what we would normally describe as music—the costumes and their relation to each other, the lighting, and the set or backdrop.
Duets, from his middle period, is just that, a series of couples performing together, each quite different but always with some connection to the couple before or alongside, sometimes just a color carried from one pair to the next, sometimes a motif in the movements. Though always in bare feet, the rigorous classical training of the dancers shone in all they did: the lithe fluidity of the bodies in often quite slow, sustained movement, the ease and beauty of body lines and the flow of the dance.
Most remarkable was the synchrony between dancers who might not be touching or even close. The music, John Cage’s Improvisation III, is for percussion, and the rhythms and timbres were reminiscent of random water drops or rain dripping on the outdoor drums at Rattlesnake Lake’s Watershed Education Center, sometimes louder, sometimes soft, but always with that texture of sound. The dancers maintained an amazing sense of where they, or their colleagues, were in what developed like a sonata for bodies.
It was ironically, the next, early work which was titled RainForest, but this was clearly not one in the Olympics. This rain forest was tropical, with a collection of taps, squawks, snarls, rustles, swoops, and swishes in David Tudor’s score of the same name, while the stage was covered in large mylar pillows by Andy Warhol of blue and silver which floated around the stage floor with others hanging motionless on the black backdrop. Dancers here were clad in fleshcolored tights, seeming nude except for the garments’ ratty condition with holes and rips. Movement was often slow, or briefly, suddenly quick, with a sense that the dancers might have been insects or occasionally a small animal stalking. The slow unfolding of two dancers moving together had extraordinary control.
Lastly came Split Sides, from 2003. This is performed according to random choices in order of dance modules, costume color modules, music, décor, even lighting. All this is chosen by dice throws which are done with due ceremony on stage at the beginning. This seemed unneccesarily pretentious. The dance itself, to music of Radiohead or Sigur Ros, again featured couples much of the time, sometimes dancing as a corps in unison and with more time spent in the air that in the other two works. There were even a couple of unmistakeable yoga poses. One dancer, temporarily alone on stage, showed mindboggling balance which passed unnoticed until you looked at his feet and saw he had one set of toes, and only that, on the floor.
In the end, Split Sides seemed more amorphous than the other two works, and lasted too long, but the overall impression left by the evening’s performance was one of superbly trained, gifted dancers in works of great imagination, and that the quality has not diminished since Cunningham’s death in 2009. May they all, wherever they disperse to, continue to preserve his work, perhaps setting his dances on other companies who are surely eager to add them to their repertoires.