It Always Pays To Take a Chance on Merce Cunningham

Storm clouds threatened to rain out Friday night’s installment of Evening Stars, the free weeklong dance festival in lower Manhattan, adding yet another variable to the already chancy operations of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Some 5,000 dance fans gathered beneath a canopy of sycamores on the Battery Park lawn, waiting in suspense for the company’s sole appearance in New York City this year. In a version of the famous anecdote about a Western audience listening rapturously to Ravi Shankar as he tuned his sitar, spectators were studying the dancers as they warmed up – stretching and hopping in puce unitards – for fear there might be nothing else to watch.Sure enough, a quarter of the way into “Batteryparkevent,” rain slashed visibly across the stage lights. The dancers retained the same imperturbable expression, but their bodies slid and trembled on the wet surfaces. As is suggested by the title (one of Mr. Cunningham’s tetchy Joyce-isms), “Batteryparkevent” is meant to run continuously for an hour, performed on two additional stages. But the one-off “mini-Event” came to an abrupt halt as stagehands dried off the boards with wash towels, before the dancers tentatively resumed.The choreography, quilted from previous material, accompanies an unrelated musical collage by five company musicians – the director Takeshisa Kosugi, along with David Behrman, Marina Rosenfeld, George Lewis, and John King. As usual, the movements were rigorously formal. Individual phrases unfolded like origami into larger combinations, sometimes arch, sometimes tender. The dancers moved as ponderously as water taxis in the New York Harbor, or else shifted with the avidity of birds, or settled with the structural weight of buildings. In a powerful duet from “Interscape,” a man responded to a woman’s touch by extending his arms to either side. Small embellishments foster warmth: a tracing hand, a forehead turned inward toward the partner’s chest.Often the dancers illustrated in an ensemble the potential variations of a single movement, elucidating between them the sphere of epaulement. In one passage reminiscent of Mr. Cunningham’s earliest experimental method with John Cage, the movement simulated men throwing dice. Seen outdoors, the activity became ingeniously abstracted as each of the crouching men took turns cantilevering a central female (Julie Cunningham) in mutual balances.Before the work began, an announcement invited us to watch the performance from all sides, even reassuring us that “There is no wrong place to see the show and all views are good views.” By placing the dancers on two stages amid the crowd, Mr. Cunningham continued his preoccupation with dances composed “in the round” – epitomized in his 1994 masterpiece “Ocean,” which was revived last July.But there are important developments: In “Ocean,” the audience surrounded the dancers on a circular stage; in “Batteryparkevent,” the existence of multiple stages produced a powerful simultaneity that surrounded the audience instead. It was impossible to watch everything at once, but the effect was felt. The extra stage introduced dramatic oppositions be yond the familiar choreography, contrasting ensemble work with solos, quick tempos with slow, red lighting with green and white. Occasionally, the pleasing moment would arrive when they appeared to be in cahoots.The electronic score filled the environment with amplified noises of sonar frequencies, crashing waves, and the cry of shorebirds. Bass pitches sounded, and felt, like the shifting of tectonic plates along the seafloor. Just as the passages flowed naturally from one to the next, the ambient character of the music blended with the ordinary sounds of traffic across the street or the foghorn of the Staten Island Ferry.So much of Mr. Cunningham’s work manipulates the conditions of performance – chance procedures, the independence of music and movement, the use of technology. Above all else, his dances are about physical relationships and, by extension, other relationships, too. The multi-directional approach and use of two stages in “Batteryparkevent” strike me as a consummation of his earlier breakthroughs. It is a marvel to watch a tableau unfold slowly, captured from different angles in various stages of emergence. At its most powerful, this serenely open-ended work can produce the effect of weather, eliciting a sense of awe not unlike contemplating the evening stars – or clouds – in the sky.

It Always Pays To Take a Chance on Merce Cunningham

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