Encounter: Merce

Stanford’s interdisciplinary exploration through the arts, focusing on the life and art of Merce Cunningham, legendary choreographer, dance innovator, and artistic thinker

Event website: http://encountermerce.stanford.edu.

Reviewed by Richard Kade
Ubiquitous Iconoclast——Xerox Corporation
Stanford, CA 94305-6004 USA

ubiq_icon@hotmail.com

Most of March 2005 at Stanford University was billed as "Merce Immersion," replete with the premiere performance of the newest ballet written especially for the occasion by the noted choreographer, Merce Cunningham. The celebration culminated in an unlikely collaboration between members of the school’s dance, computer sciences, and medical departments in an outlandish attempt at disambiguating the so-called "vocabulary of ‘traditional’ ballet" as in contradistinction to that developed by Cunningham and his company over the course of the past quarter- to half-century.

In much the same way Stravinsky could be said to be the "Picasso of music" (or, similarly, C. S. Forester observed Puccini to be the "Wagner of opera"), one could postulate plausibly that Cunningham has long been the "John Cage of dance"——were it not for the fact that these two had actually performed simultaneously on the same stages, in the same numbers, for a number of years.

Use, twice, of the word "same" in the previous sentence might be misleading in the larger sense as one easily might conclude erroneously that some collaborative effort was under way. Yes, Cage and Cunningham often traversed the nation together in a beat-up VW van but, once on stage, any idea of planning a coherent work——where two art forms (music and ballet) were fused to convey any notion of a united aesthetic effort——seemed an abhorrent violation of spontaneity.

In fact, at the height of their performances together, the concept of freeform knew no limits. Cunningham decided that, in addition to Cage and himself, the lighting crew ought also to partake in the free-for-all. The most memorable, if not noteworthy, result of this stroke of "genius" was that, at a key point where Merce was at the apogee of one of his leaps, a bright spotlight temporarily blinded him causing his fall into the pit. Alas, this did not deter him from continuing his choreographic pursuits that persist to this day.

While ample instances of the work of Merce Cunningham (old notes and the like) abound on this and other of the Stanford pages referenced on this site, the bottom line is simple. That which we humans regard as "classic"——be it music, sculpture, poetry, gastronomy, painting, origami, folding photons, etc.——is what we continue to return to because it ignites a spark within our soul. Such creativity is almost never a matter of happenstance. Even the most talented artists in the realm of jazz improvisation work within the context of an understood framework.

To see how firmly rooted in vacuity the creations of Merce Cunningham are, and always have been, one need look no further than the works of Mark Morris (Falling Down Stairs or Hard Nut) or Michael Smuin (Starshadows or Stabat Mater). Unplug the virtual-reality sensors and forget the pretentious and nonsensical nano-analyses of every component of the work. As Yogi Berra so aptly put it, "You can see a lot by observing!"