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REVIEW: Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Published: 3/11/2009 5:43 PM
Last Modified: 3/11/2009 5:43 PM

John Cage once said, "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry."

By that standard, the performance Tuesday night by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company can be described as pure poetry.

Cunningham, who started out as a ballroom dancer, then became a leading soloist with the Martha Graham company before setting out on his own as a choreographer and performer, is often described as this country's greatest living choreographer. Much of his work he created for himself to perform, and film footage we've seen of Cunningham dancing can be startlingly beautiful and hypnotic.

There were a few moments at the show Tuesday night in the Tulsa PAC's Chapman Music Hall when that sense of uncanny, unearthly beauty emerged from the visual and aural static of Cunningham's pieces. But too much of the evening seemed purposeless, a series of exercises in choreographic solipsism – or just simply exercises.

Certainly "Second Hand," the second piece of the evening, qualified for that description. Set against a string single-note meandering melodic fragments by Cage, the choreography resembled very tightly controlled and very artfully executed calisthenics. Imagine watching a tai-chi class for 20 minutes, and you get the idea. There seems to be a vaguely romantic subtext to the goings-on, as the man in yellow (Robert Swinston, who usually performs the parts Cunningham originally danced) engages in a not so much a duet as a shared parallel existence that is disrupted by the accumulation of others in singly colored leotard, so that his half-hearted attempts to reconnect with the woman in orange end with him alone on stage, hands raised in an almost beseeching pose.

"Second Hand" was the oldest piece on the program, dating back to 1970. It was also, in Cunningham's words, the last time he "made a work following the phraseology of a musical score.” From then on, Cunningham would create and rehearse his dances in silence, adding any music only after the piece was in a finished state.

The other two works on the program were accompanied by aggressively annoying electronic scores. "Fabrications" (1987) blended together an oddly musical industrial drone – as if a series of jet engines had been tuned to replicate the sound of someone resting a forearm on a pipe organ keyboard – with what sounded like someone slowed scanning along an AM radio band.

The score calls for several minutes of silence midway, and it was then that the choreography – oddly enough – began to make more sense. It was as if Cunningham was trying deliberately to distract you by juxtaposing these sounds with these movements, implying connections that are not there (one way to take the title "Fabrications"). When the dancers began moving in silence, suddenly this dance was almost beautiful. Then the noise began again.

One other way of looking at this piece is that the "Fabrications" are the occasional, almost deliberately clumsy duets that happen from time to time. It could be that the point Cunningham wanted to make with this piece is that the efforts we make to "connect" or "work with" other people are the fabrications, the artificial actions we think we need to do. Instead, individuals doing their own things – dancing to their own inner choreographers and finding themselves serendipitously in sync with those around them – is what is "natural."

Or maybe I'm trying to hard, and there's no purpose to the piece at all. It's just there, movement for movement's sake, sharing space with sound for sound's sake. If that's the case, then I can appreciate and understand the idea, and even recognize the validity of pursuing that idea.

The problem is, dance – for all the intelligence that is necessary to create it – is still a visceral art form. Dance that aims only for the mind, that elicts only the reaction of "Hey, cool concept, man," is dance that fails.

So the only piece of the evening that succeeded was the finale, "Sounddance," a whirlwind of perpetual motion created in 1975, and served up with a soundscape that sounded like a bank of 1960s-era computers suffering from severe indigestion.

Fortunately, Cunningham's choreography made it easy to ignore the sounds. This piece was truly about moving – how fast, how high, how many turns, how far can one bend. It also was the only piece of the evening that required the company to work together rather than merely gyrate in proximity to each other. It was risky and thrilling and the 11 dancers gave it their all.



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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