During the mid-1950s and early 1960s, Merce Cunningham, the most inventive and influential American choreographer of the second half of the twentieth century, took his dance company, founded in 1953 at the legendary Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, on the road. They traveled in the maverick composer John Cage’s Volkswagen Microbus, that iconic conveyance of the counterculture. Cunningham was once asked why his company consisted of only nine people, including Cage, his artistic collaborator and life partner, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg, a former student of Cunningham’s at Black Mountain, who designed the sets and costumes. Cunningham responded that nine was the maximum number of people who could squeeze into the bus. On one occasion, stopping at a gas station in Ohio, the dancers, according to Cage, “all piled out to go to the toilets and exercise around the pumps.” Curious about the peculiar movements on display, the attendant asked if the dancers were a band of comedians. “No,” Cage answered, “we’re from New York.”
Encountering this anecdote in Cunningham, the exuberant recent film timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Cunningham’s birth in 1919, you might find yourself wondering whether the gas station attendant was entirely wrong. There is a great deal of laughter in Cunningham, both on the screen and, during the two showings I attended, in the movie theater. Archival footage from the vaudevillian Antic Meet (1958) is laugh-out-loud funny. In the section titled “Room for Two,” a man with a Thonet chair strapped to his back courts a demure woman in an antique dressing gown, who appears from a door that rolls, seemingly on its own ghostly power, onto the stage. When the man kneels, she sits matter-of-factly on the chair. Everything in the pas de deux is performed deadpan, with an occasional discordant gesture, as when the man, in profile, lunges forward and opens his mouth wide, while the woman assumes a graceful arabesque.
More a dance film than a traditional documentary, Cunningham showcases the choreographer’s work, in extended dance sequences, with minimal attention to chronology or biographical detail. Directed by the Boston-based documentarian Alla Kovgan, the film was available in some theaters in 3D, and opens with a swooping aerial view of Manhattan, which zooms in on an uncanny shot of seemingly tiny dancers in multicolored leotards slowly assuming balletic poses on a rooftop. Kovgan filmed, in vivid color, outdoor reenactments of classic Cunningham dances—in a forest, by a pond, in front of a castle—as though the dancers had escaped the confines of the theater altogether. These elegant, reverential sequences lack the urgency of the grainy, archival 2D footage of Cunningham himself, a stupendous dancer and magnetic stage presence, rehearsing his dancers or performing his own dances in his loose-limbed and seemingly improvisatory way.
Kovgan glosses over Cunningham’s early years: his upbringing in Centralia, Washington, in a family of lawyers, and his first meeting with Cage, another Westerner, at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where Cunningham was an eager young actor, performing Shakespeare and Chekhov, as well as a dancer. Cage, seven years older, accompanied the dance classes with compositions partly indebted to the twelve-tone system of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, and partly to his own radical experiments with percussion. Cage would come to believe that Western music had taken a wrong turn with Beethoven, into expressiveness and heightened emotion; Beethoven’s “lamentable” influence, he felt, had been “deadening to the art of music.” Cage was married at the time, to an Alaskan artist of Russian background named Xenia. It isn’t clear when precisely the oddball composer and the preternaturally gifted dancer became romantically involved; Alastair Macaulay, dance critic for The New York Times, says they “became an item” in 1943. Cunningham remembered Cage, years later, as a formidable presence for the students, who referred to him as “the handsome new man in the red sweater.”
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1
In Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary, Carrie Noland traces the pose to the Odious Warrior figure of classical Hindu drama, one of Cunningham’s unacknowledged sources. ↩
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2
Hilarie M. Sheets, “Long-Lost Merce Cunningham Work Is Reconstructed in Boston,” The New York Times, June 18, 2015. The footage from Changeling was a centerpiece of the 2015 traveling exhibition on the arts at Black Mountain College, “Leap Before You Look.” See my review in these pages, “A Wonderfully Ephemeral College,” May 26, 2016. ↩
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3
It was also a reflection of his engagement with Stein. “At Pomona College, in response to questions about the Lake Poets, I wrote in the manner of Gertrude Stein, irrelevantly and repetitiously. I got an A. The second time I did it I was failed.” See Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. ix. ↩
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4
When I studied at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, during the summer of 1972, Graham technique was still dominant while Graham herself, confined to a wheelchair, was a regal presence. ↩