Merce Cunningham
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: ...
“The high carriage, the flexible head, the level gaze, the ultra-articulated feet, the aura of sang-froid. . . .” This is not a description of classical ballet but of the first Merce Cunningham dance company, founded in 1953. Roger Copeland, professor of theater and dance at Oberlin College, sees in Cunningham an updated classicism and a welcome respite from the overwrought romanticism of modern dance as exemplified by Martha Graham.
For Graham, modern dance was a quest for “wholeness,” the physical-emotional state of harmony presumed to exist among “primitive” people and to lie buried in the civilized unconscious. Its guiding spirit was Carl Jung, and as Copeland notes, it pervaded both modern dance and abstract expressionism—they shared a cult of spontaneous gesture and a commitment to art as an inner journey.
Toward abstract expressionism Copeland maintains a certain objectivity, but toward Graham’s version of modern dance he is unapologetically dismissive, recalling his youthful aversion to its “primitivism”: “The very names of [Graham’s] characters, so literary, so burdened with overly generalized Meaning, tended to put me off: ‘He Who Summons’; ‘She of the Ground’; ‘The One Who Speaks’ . . . all of which made me feel like
‘The One Whose Head Ached from Allegory.’”
Copeland’s cure was “the icy, dandified virtuosity” of Cunningham, who, collaborating with composer John Cage, eschewed instinct, intuition, and inspiration in favor of random procedures, what Cage called “chance operations.” The two men also severed the connection between movement and music: Cunningham’s rigorously trained dancers moved in ways unrelated to Cage’s music.
If Graham is the foil for the first half of Copeland’s book, the foil for the second is the aesthetic that has largely supplanted Cunningham’s high modernism: the diverse impulses that fall under the heading of postmodernism. Many of the ideas and devices associated with postmodernism were actually part of modernism, such as collage (dating back to cubism) and the use of mass media (dating back to futurism). In this sense Cunningham, who, in 1989, at age 70, became the first modern dancer to use computer imaging, is both a modernist and a postmodernist.
Cunningham’s distinctive way of working produced many beauties, not least because his dancers were so virtuosic. Copeland is at his eloquent best when defending the sheer aesthetic power of this “modernized” modern dance. Unfortunately, he also feels obliged to defend Cunningham against critics who fault him for insufficient political engagement. Apparently, it’s not enough to create works of grace, clarity, and intelligence; the artist must also liberate human perception, illuminate the future of technology, reconcile the human soul with the fragmented universe, and dispense wisdom in the wake of 9/11. So intent is Copeland on crediting Cunningham with that menu of accomplishments, he accepts the postmodernist maxim that an art of feeling is no longer possible because our psyches have been fatally “conditioned” by advertising and corporate-controlled media.
Of course, as Copeland points out, this postmodernist distrust of emotion does not extend to identity politics, in which issues of race and gender provide a pretext for dancers to wallow in depths of subjectivity unplumbed even by Graham. Distaste for such excesses is no doubt what drives Copeland to place so much emphasis on the “icy” aspect of Cunningham. But as this fascinating book also shows, it takes emotional maturity, even wisdom, to create an art that is deadpan without being dead, cool without being cold. Surely this will be the true legacy of Merce Cunningham.