2 Cunningham dancers - Merce Cunningham Dance Company dancers Derry Swan and Thomas Caley - Cover Story - Interview

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1997 by Bill Deresiewicz, Gus Solomons, Jr.

DERRY SWAN

A YEAR WITH MERCE

A young dancer discovers the challenges of joining a major company.

For almost any young modern dancer, getting into the Merce Cunningham Dance Company would be a dream come true. Cunningham is one of the world's great choreographers, and his dancers are as superb, majestic, and consummately trained as any in modern dance. But what happens when a dream comes true? When you cross the horizon of your imagination, what awaits you on the other side?

On January 2, 1996, the dream began to come true for Derry Swan, a twenty-five-year-old dancer from warthmore, Pennsylvania. That's the date she was taken on as a member of the Cunningham company's Repertory Understudy Group. Two months later she was asked to join (he company itself.

At the time Swan hadn't even known how much longer she would continue to dance. Life as an aspiring dancer was stressful and bare-bones. "For a long time I was running around from job to job to class to rehearsal," she says, "trying to fit in all the pieces where I could. Every day I would have to figure out a different schedule, making sure I had all the right clothes with me, squeezing in things when I had half an hour free." The jobs--clerical work, babysitting--provided just enough to get by. Her apartment was a tiny studio she could use only five days a week, crashing at her boyfriend's the other two nights.

Swan had begun dance classes at age nine with a good local ballet teacher, but the typical dancer's childhood never sat well with her. "My family would always give me pointe shoes and little ballerina music boxes and stuff, but I was never into it," she says. "I had the pink bedroom with toe shoe posters on the wall, but I hated it. It never did feel like mine."

As it turned out, Swan was gifted with an unusually fine instrument--easy hips, beautiful feet, and, most conspicuously, extraordinarily powerful legs. For a long time she allowed herself to make do with what she had. "I'd always been naturally flexible," she says, "but I never worked hard when I was little. In fact, until I started taking class at Cunningham, the things that came naturally I did, and everything else I kind of muddled through."

Swan chose Barnard College for its combination of academic excellence and a good dance department. There she began to discover an alternative to ballet. "It was a combination of things. You go through this feminist phase where you think that bunheads are about women not standing up for themselves and their rights. I got tired of the pretty, happy stories; and working with choreographers there I discovered a lot of different forms of modern dance. And everyone in the ballet classes would be very neat and wear the pretty skirts, and I've never been good at being like that. I felt kind of gawky and silly, and then I found this other way--that it was okay to have rips in your tights and not have perfect hair or wear makeup."

After graduation Swan decided to continue working with Neta Pulvermacher, a choreographer she had met at school. The choice was a difficult one to make for a Barnard graduate. "I worried for a long time. You know, `Women have to go out into the work world and prove themselves.' A lot of my friends did that when they graduated, and I was, well, dancing and babysitting. But I loved Neta's work. We'd go to rehearsal and discuss everything, and we helped choreograph, too. For the first two years she paid us what she could, a few dollars a month. I couldn't even afford to take class. Everything else that I did was so I could do that, even though I knew that it wasn't going to get me anywhere."

Swan began to study at the Cunningham studio--not for artistic reasons but because the studio offers a scholarship program that finally enabled her to take class on a regular basis. But if she came to Cunningham for the money, she stayed for the purity of the technique and the seriousness with which it is taught there: "Right off the bat I knew that Cunningham technique was really special. Something about those classes in particular--I've never worked as hard, and I've never felt as good as I do about anything else. It's the same thing every day, but there's so much within it. It's almost like a meditation, I think. It's beautiful."

After a few months, she caught the eye of Patricia Lent, a former Cunningham dancer and a member of the studio faculty who was choosing students for a repertory workshop. "What I saw in Derry," Lent says, "was a dancer who had a lot of natural talent, but who also had the ability to change. Her body is really, really smart. You'd make a correction, and there'd be a visual change. That's one of the things that's not obvious to people. When someone's picked for a company, they'll say, `All these people are good enough.' Yes, they're good enough, but the question is, where are they going to be a year from now?"

About a year later, after she had become one of the most promising young dancers at the studio, Swan got her big opportunity with the impending retirement of Jenifer Weaver, Cunningham's leading female virtuoso. One day she was just another student, scraping by financially and wondering how much longer she'd even want to keep trying; and the next day she was being asked to step into roles created for a dancer she had revered for years. Cunningham, she learned, does not hold auditions.