23. After Merce: An editorial by Michael Porter
When Merce Cunningham died in 2009, he took more with him than the originating genius of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The special breed of performer known as the Cunningham Dancer ceased to be produced out of repertory practice when, according to the choreographer’s wishes, his ensemble was disbanded as he attained his mortal end. Professional dancers are inevitably birthed and honed not only in regular classes but in frequent performance before live audiences. The Merce Cunningham Trust has given itself the task of preserving the works of a choreographer who privileged such “process” over product. But for the productive performer the challenge of maintaining engagement with a specific aesthetic and a demanding technique requires constant rehearsal and cumulative stage experience. How the Trust plans to maintain and develop such available artistry in the absence of a dedicated theatrical ensemble made up of such practiced dancers is the issue. Dance cannot be encapsulated in archival plans and videos to its advantage. Can Cunningham “choreography” even be said to exist without a developmental training and performing group working toward realization? Dance styles can become as endangered as nature’s species. This is an issue that resonates beyond the individual Cunningham situation.
There is a sense in which Cunningham was vanguard dance during his career. The eventual Judson Church movement derived a number of its tenets from the Cunningham aesthetic. It could be argued that Cunningham was still inventing new, adventurous work after the Judson movement had lost its original impetus. From the point of view of various Mercists, the repertory of the longer-lived Paul Taylor was too conventional to be seen as sufficiently advanced, except perhaps in certain areas of his process. (One would be Taylor’s embrace of found movement.) In conjunction with his partner and collaborator, John Cage, Cunningham evolved a form of spectacle that questioned a number of received ideas about concert dance, an enquiry that intrigued and satisfied a local dance audience eager for novelty. The difficulty, of course, is that the very conditions that prompted Cunningham to ask questions are no longer necessarily to be found in our dance culture, and this absence now qualifies the possibility of its being seen as “advanced” experimentation. Can there be an avant-garde when tradition itself is absent or in disrepair, as it is often perceived to be throughout the dance world in 2019?
One hundred years have passed since Cunningham’s birth. A decade has elapsed since his death. At the present moment, the Martha Graham ensemble dedicates itself to an educational aim and regimen. Following its leader’s demise, the Paul Taylor company has expanded its brief to include curatorial supervision of the entire history of American modern and postmodern dance – a redefinition of purpose that could indeed represent the nail in the coffin of those native forms. A museum, after all, is primarily reserved for evidence of past accomplishment. Even with an occasional guest choreographer from the downtown pool of local dance makers, the redefined Taylor ensemble will work regularly at conservation.
In national and international ballet, the absence of choreographic leaders who would extend the inheritance of Petipa, Ashton, and Balanchine is more than evident. Audiences tap their toes through many a desperate new effort on the part of our major companies to appear innovative and “woke”. Schools of ballet stock stages with dancers for the classical repertory from The Big Three (Marius, Fred and George), but productions of older foundational works are not necessarily in the hands of current masters. The new approach of contemporary stagers of the full-length Petipa-Ivanov classics is to style oneself as a permanent student of the past, not as a ready regisseur. The hand of the cryptanalytic conservator is felt in the land. The presence of repertory “classics” may guarantee a certain boxoffice take, but they can also be used by various artistic directors to avoid commissioning new work connected to the ballet tradition. If that is what is wanted – classical ballet -- one can always revive something by the Big Three, so goes the excuse. (An equivalent attitude has led opera to its moribund state.) This sets the stage for an influx of “ballets” utterly unconnected to the tradition, a type of entertainment that now dominates commissions around the ballet world.
Why this appetite for the “advanced” in a conservative art form? Could it be that in the absence of real experimentation – such as Cunningham’s – our ballet companies themselves hope to fill a sensed void? And in his case, the very banners of “innovation” flourished by advocates have been the first to become tattered with the passing of time and the change of context.
Without the living vanguard artist’s on-going adjustment of his relation to surrounding culture, standards in innovation blur. Cunningham’s death ended his deployment of quantitative metric, perspectivism, chance, non-hierarchical form, Zen affects, video choreology, etc. – all those self-employed challenges to his developing process which also provided critical approaches to distinguishing his work from past and contemporary ideas of dance-making. Appreciation of the most challenging aspects of an innovator’s work can quickly become a form of mild nostalgia.
If a young artist wishes to be “avant” today, he will be hard-pressed to find an entrenched academy or active school of choreography which can be used for oppositional duty. Without a living old guard to aid in such self-definition, there can be difficulty in finding an opportunity for pushback, an absence of future if past and present fail to offer entrenched resistance. The ambitious youngster may succumb to an “identity crisis” when denied the opportunity to rebel. It is not so much that an avaricious popular culture has over-incorporated examples from the avant-gardes of the past to its own, possibly commercial ends. A splintered Pop has lost many of its powers of cultural mediation. The spectacle of the New York Times’ arts and leisure coverage attempting to identify a centralizing Pop milieu is one of the droll journalistic entertainments of our time. Watch the artist who would offer an alternative to the status quo scramble to locate some worthy opponent! Watch the journalist fumble for a hook! According to the Times, a really dangerous modern dance may best survive on the FX series Pose, thanks to the choreography of Tracy Inman.
For the aging lone innovator, like later Cunningham, only his or her early work may eventually become the best opposition. (“How to be very, very original.”) Cunningham himself may not only have desired new challenges to test his skills at dance-making; in his final decades he may also have sensed a coming void uptown and down: a tragedy of fashions. In that case, he may have departed Gotham just in time.
In the absence of an aesthetic game worth playing, performances of Cunningham’s works can now look merely eccentric rather than chance-taking. Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of a choreographic project so dependent on serial innovation. (Already, the pointe work “classics” of William Forsythe have begun to look dated. Even he may be bored with his modern-ballet approach. Forsythe now promotes something he calls “ballet ballet”.) Across Cunningham’s long career, the master’s early works could be redefined in repertory revival through the lens of eventual, on-going shifts in his idiomatic process. That redefinition is no longer possible. I was reminded of this deficiency in revivals of his dances at recent showings of the Workshop Program of the Merce Cunningham Trust at City Center studios in August. The level of performance skill among the dancers ranged from professional to near-tyro in the repertory excerpts shown, but that was not the problem. The difficulty lay in the change of context. The world around this repertory has altered, and Cunningham is not here to adjust the frame within which his dances can be presented and received.
There were exceptions. Excerpts from Assemblage were reproduced from a 1968 film made for television broadcast. Thus, we were seeing an imaginative recreation for the studio of a dance that was conceived for video transmission and partially performed outdoors before the camera. As a result, the 2019 Assemblage was not a revival but a new dance work “after Merce Cunningham”. (The day may soon come when the majority of future revivals of his dances may best be described in this way.) The most effective section in the new Assemblage was a series of entrances through a “doorway” indicated at the rear of the space, attacked with some of the controlled energy of Sounddance.
Scenario was burdened in its original stage presentation with bulbous costumes by Rei Kawakubo. Their chief contribution was a maddening sway, a loose vibrato that distracted from watching the dance movement. Perhaps this was intentional (but I doubt it). The new studio reconstruction stripped away those costumes, and as a result the audience had a chance to see the actual choreography at long last, in something like the practice clothes exposure of one of Cunningham’s famous Events. The 2019 Workshop dancers brought less of a “vitalist” performance focus to the work than one recalls. This was Cunningham in his near-courtly mode, with dance details that attained an almost Balinese delicacy. There were wonderfully complex counterpoint passages between couples. The adagio-legato sections for the women were especially engrossing – at least in short passages. Some of the movement invention reminded one of the performing genius of Viola Farber and Cunningham himself: dance fantasy that evolves a unique logic. No wonder School-of-Cunningham choreographers are unconvincing today: they attempt a revolution in a void. I am thinking of the unavoidable Pam Tanowitz, whose style manages to combine diffused Merce allusions with a genteelly impressionistic version of classical ballet. To be avoided at all costs: her Bartók excursion at New York City Ballet.
Perhaps we generally impose another form of misprision on Wayne McGregor’s work here in the States. The British presumably take his creations (both for the Royal Ballet where he is “resident choreographer” and for his own Wayne McGregor Studio company) as examples of advanced movement exploration. As such, his experiments do not measure up in New York eyes to what remains here of equivalent postmodern and Judson studies. But in the context of the recent summer Joyce Theater Ballet Festival’s Program One (curated by Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet’s current artistic director), we could at last begin see the error of our American interpretive ways.
Reports have at last reached us of a change in the style of theatrical reception for West End musical theater (for example, at the Tina Turner revue at the Aldwych -- a version of which is soon to open here in Manhattan). Audiences resembling football (read “soccer”) celebrants can currently be counted on to “party” and contest with one another during London theatrical performances, requiring special policing of the resultant yobbish riot. McGregor’s past ballets and concert dances can now be seen as prophetic of this new level of violence amid the British populace. The recent Joyce performances of his Qualia Pas de Deux with Sarah Lamb and Edward Watson are now revealed as distilled sociological reportage. Lamb – a promising ballerina in the classics only ten years ago – has become a deracinated waif dancing McGregor’s material. Surely this exposé was intentional, a theatrical portrait of what we now can recognize as the typical Brit club girl, wired-up and burnt-out. Wayne McGregor was never a choreographer; he’s a once and present seer. Ballet fans are used to the drunken expense account crowd at Covent Garden, more at home in Floral Hall ordering another round than unwoke in waiting stalls. McGregor is the equalizing factor. You need a drink to watch one of his creations, and then you need several more at intermission to stay the course. Here in New York the only current choreographer so ready to turn the stage toward ultra-display is Claudia Schreier. Her work – also seen recently at the Joyce -- will keep local bartenders very busy. What did she herald? Ballet bully Lara Spencer? Art and life are thus rendered one. We are indebted to our prophets.
Aesthetic misprision can occur anywhere in the world, and to many of the younger generation, the past must always be a foreign country. At the David Koch Theater recently, the Guangzhou Ballet of China brought its dancers to New York City in a program that featured Goddess of the Luo River (original title, Memory on Water), with music by Du Mingxin and choreography by the Canadian-born Peter Quanz. The work’s veteran Chinese composer is obviously dedicated to conscripting Western musical forms and styles, with a special emphasis here on a thoroughly mobilized Samuel Barber. The Chinese, those inventors of gunpowder, would now encourage invention at home by importing what they take to be Western firecrackers. Perhaps to new Chinese audiences, the Quanz choreography looks avant-garde. He has adapted a Tetley-Feld style (young romantics testing possibilities for intimacy and identity in each other’s arms) to a native heart-on-sleeve violin concerto. Goodness knows how the company’s home audience takes the East-West musical mash-up. As a satire of modern decadence? A glimpse of the forbidden city?
Quanz’s dancers maintain formal decorum and stylistic dignity against all sonic odds with handsome ports de bras and Vaganova-trained backs. The result is near-calligraphic in its upper body stylishness. I especially liked an early wheel-spoked ensemble pattern for circling women: one line rotates with changing arms, the other with articulate legs. When the lines meet and cross, a fully animated figure is briefly glimpsed, top and bottom, with the sudden judder of a cinematic flip-book. And a later unison entrance of the male corps de ballet was shrewdly calculated to attain a new plateau of dynamics. I raise the question of how this ballet was taken in Guangzhou (beyond a passing example of foreign exotica) because catch-up audiences for Cunningham revivals here in New York may now look upon his dances as equally curious diversions. Around the world, the young may be beyond extraordinary appeal. This way to The Shed. In the coming winter Quanz will become resident choreographer of Harrin Ballet in Northern China.
It is possible that the Cunningham tradition will only survive in the practice of some future individual talent, an eventual choreographer able to transmit something of a past aesthetic in his own work, as Balanchine was able to reinvent and extend the Petipa achievement across a new century and around the world. Are there any talents today who have preserved something of the Cunningham spirit? In what is left of American modern dance, I have long enjoyed the capable, witty works of Neil Greenberg, a former Cunningham performer. And in current ballet, Matthew Brookoff holds aloft the torch. Good hands make for ready relay.
M.P.
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