Merce Cunningham has a glorious reputation, no doubt about it. In the course of writing about his career for last week’s Xpress I attended a lecture and read three books, all of which reinforced that impression. And following Saturday’s performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Diana Wortham Theatre, his reputation got a standing ovation from many people in the audience.
Others apparently shared my impression and sat it out.
The dancers were mostly quite good and obviously thoroughly trained and even talented. But the dances simply didn’t work. Cunningham and his long-time collaborator John Cage deliberately disconnected dance from music. Dancers practice with a stopwatch, sometimes don’t hear the score before a premiere and so on. Well, they succeeded. The “music” bore no discernible relationship to what transpired on stage. Truth be told, the “music” bore very little discernible relationship to music. Oh, I know that I will be damned by the art crowd for my pedestrian taste, but recording random sounds was amusing once. When I was 12.
Then, too, Cunningham and Cage decided to liberate creativity from the confines of linear thought and introduced chance to the dance. After performers learned their moves, the moves were randomly reordered through various devices. Flipped coins, rolled dice or tossed yarrow sticks were used to determine who would do what when. Hence there is little or no choreography in any traditional sense. Now and again two dancers or a few would perform somewhat similar moves in something approaching unison, which raised a question. Were they doing what Merce told them to do—or mucking up? And does it matter? Maybe not. Defenders of Cunningham’s creative brilliance would say that that is the point.
But if all motion is therefore to be regarded as dance, why ask people to pay $45 a pop? You can see random motion set to miscellaneous noise anywhere people gather. The soundtrack as I type this sentence includes sirens and horns and co-workers chattering in the hall. It’s what you might call free-range sound (Cage-free, at any rate), and the seating is more comfortable.
What emerged in the theater looked for all the world like a practice session with each performer working on some particular piece of a dance while irritating noises from a factory next door blasted through the studio.
Having attended dance performances by Pilobolus and Momix over the years, I went into the theater with very high hopes and emerged sadly disappointed. It’s been 50 years since MCDC performed in this valley—all too soon for this dance lover.
— Cecil Bothwell, staff writer
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