Merce Cunningham at 75 - why modern dance choreographer's works can no longer sustain their avant-music or their maker's vision - Column

Dance Magazine, May, 1994 by Clive Barnes

Where do rebels go in wintertime? How terrible can any enfant be when he's the oldest kid on the block?

Tough questions, but they do not seem to bother that hickory-skinned, eternal leprechaun Merce Cunningham, who achieved on April 16 the unlikely milestone birthday of threescore and ten plus five. Merce at seventy-five? Not since Mickey Mouse touched seventy have we had such an unexpected birthday. Yet Cunningham continues along what now seems his own preordained path of modern dance with a classic classroom twist, which relies on time rather than music for its energy, platform, and trampoline, and has aspirations to painterly abstractions.

I personally came to Cunningham fairly late in his career, not seeing his work until 1964 in London - when it was very different from the way it is now. Still, it had already started to formulate its not quite predictable future. Looking back at my first reviews of Merce, thirty years ago now, I can only characterize myself as an admirer with doubts. Unlike most of my English colleagues, I instantly cottoned on to the classical constituent, noting that the final Cunningham results "resembled The Sleeping Beauty more than The Green Table." And, as I was also working as a music critic at the time, I was less surprised by the soundscores than most, although I did recommend wearing earplugs for most of the evening.

By 1964 my musical travel and travails had accustomed me to the sounds of the electronic avant-garde and almost inured me to its amusical caterwaulings. Technology had already taken over enough of music's territory for me to have been present when an entire concert had to be canceled after an all-important fuse blew on some obscure mechanical noisemaker. The curious thing is - and more of this later - that these revolutionary sounds (referred to by their advocates as being as advanced for their day as, say, the misunderstood Stravinsky had been fifty years previously) even now thirty years later have made no real inroads upon popular cultivated musical taste. Our concert halls still stand and our symphony orchestras remain inviolate.

The music apart, what originally whetted my interest in Cunningham was his move towards abstraction. This seemed an extraordinarily twentieth-century concern. Much of the history of twentieth-century art - particularly as seen from the solstice point of the 1950s and 1960s - had been, first in painting and sculpture but later even in music and literature, a move towards abstract form. Many ballets at that time - especially the neoclassical choreography of Balanchine and Ashton - were labeled abstract. This was when critics were trying to invent a vocabulary to describe dance, and I think I devised and validated the term plotless on the grounds that one could not have abstract ballets until one had "abstract people."

There were at that time two approaches to dance abstraction. The first, and most obvious, was that of dressing people up as lampshades or something of that kind so that they did not even look like people but resembled animated blobs or the like. This was pioneered, though later abandoned, by Martha Graham and still later highly developed by that adroit old theatrical wizard, Alwin Nikolais. Then, rather more subtly, there was the Cunningham route. This depended on having people behave in unlikely - therefore "abstract" - fashion, with the fragmentation of movement and dance phrases in gobbets and clusters rather than lines, together with Cunningham - John Cage aleatoric tricks, depending on chance and happenstance. It all created a sense of the unreal and the, yes, abstract. Logic had very logically gone out the window and with it some sense of anthropomorphic dancing. Or, that's how it seemed to some midcentury anthropomorphic critics!

And then there was the matter, the grave and significant matter, of the music. There was John Cage as well as Merce Cunningham - Cage, Cunningham, and their relationship. I adore the story Joan Acocella recently printed quoting Cage's definition of their essentially symbiotic relationship: "I do the cooking. and he does the dishes." And as time went on, that cooking became more and more important, and Cage's influence became the sound-bite of the tail which wagged the toothless choreographic dog, if you will forgive a mongrel metaphor.

The originality of Cunningham's dance vision - the sort of imagination that thirty years ago would offer works as varied as Rune, Summerspace, Winterbranch, and Nocturnes - has become ossified. It is now pallid and pastel, flat-footed classroom classicism, the bland coloration of which doubtless derives in part from the jettisoning of the artistic counsel of painters such as Robert Rauschenberg, for the chic and prettier concepts of designers such as Mark Lancaster.

But the big change has come with the hardening of the musical arteries. It is curious how much the aural decor - those sound environments that have usually encased and, in the past, occasionally enhanced Cunningham's choreography - has become harsher and cruder with the passing years. While the choreography has become less and less hard-edged in inspiration and more and more compromised in tone, the soundscores accompanying it have become more raucous, more inane, more offensive and most of all more humorless. Cage in his heyday always maintained a wonderfully urbane sense of human irony, but his hard-nosed acolytes, hell-bent in the pit, stooped over their simmering electronic devices, are simply pompous and absurd.