Left to right: Hope Mohr, Nicole Peisl, and Rashaun Mitchell. Photo by Hillary Goidell.
A Bridge to Cunningham in Six Quotations
By Garth Grimball
I like poems to be poetic and prose to be prosaic, religion to be prophetic and philosophy to be crystal clear.
Edmund White
This year marks the centennial of Merce Cunningham, one of the most influential and prolific choreographers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. An influence so great that rather than settle for a fun Google doodle on the day of his birth, dance companies and artists around the globe are restaging and exploring his deep oeuvre in honor and celebration of his impact as an artist and thinker. On November 8 and 9, the Bay Area welcomed Signals from the West: Bay Area Artists in Conversation with Merce Cunningham at 100, led by Hope Mohr Dance’s The Bridge Project and co-produced with ODC Theater, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and the Merce Cunningham Trust. Ten artists were selected to participate in a residency with Rashaun Mitchell and Silar Reiner, former Cunningham Company dancers, to create original works, and four dancers were cast to learn and perform Cunningham repertory. That’s 11 artists’ works plus collaborators sharing an evening to honor/complicate/respond to the legacy of one man.
What is a legacy? And what is it worth? It is easy to reduce Cunningham’s creative voice to systems. Chance operations - I Ching, Solitaire, flipping a coin - guide his choreographic craft. This democratic, formalist method is equal parts impenetrable and inviting. It is what it is. It refuses to submit to the tyranny of narrative. Cunningham technique is precise and exacting. This is why the work is so ripe for interpretation, so fecund for collaboration. All of it is there.
What is culture?
The formation of attention.
Simone Weil
Jenny Odell, Sofía Córdova, and Julie Moon transform the visual texture of Cunningham’s dances into multimedia. Odell’s Merce-bau video art is the creative process. The dancer Sarah Cecilia Bukowski moves within the limits of various filmed aspect ratios edited as an evolving Tetris game. Merce-bau elicits the fragmentary and sublime in making. Córdova’s Underwater Moonlight (days of blood & milk) is a found poem collage. There is a visual discord of ‘90s era media content with 2019 editing capability. Geometry, directions, and nature collapse and fold in on each other. With Quincunx Julie Moon connects tactile and digital. A platform sculpture of overlapping common materials (artificial grass, paper, styrofoam) invites the audience to feel difference beneath our feet. Using a QR code we experience a virtual kaleidoscopic visualization on our phones, later projected in the theater, of geometric shapes employed in the sculpture. Standing on the platform and focusing on the digital is like occupying the space between two mirrors, turning around, trying to catch yourself in the infinite reflections.
I’m wondering why every act that narrate[s] female lived experience ... has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.”
Chris Kraus
Nicole Peisl’s for_rest and Danishta Rivero’s Tejidos/Weavings, or No puedo hablar con mi voz sino con mis voces are active, real-time collaborations. Each have a singular artistic voice, literally and figuratively. Neither sacrifice the power of the individual in art created by the communal. Peisl invites 8 audience members to join her in an improvisation score. She wiggles and extends her entire body in polyrhythms as the volunteers pause and permit her flow to continue. Rivero, with Alexandra Buschman-Román, Rodolfo Córdova, gabby fluke-mogul, and Shanna Sordahl, create a Meredith Monk meets Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music soundscape. Donning flowy white costumes the performers circle a stationary microphone singing vocal rounds and overlaps as Sordahl manipulates and re-engineers electronically. The vocal ensemble thrills in contrasting dulcet tones with warbles and trembles befitting of a horror film. The volume and vocal intensity contrast the slow pacing steps. It’s more than a difference in time signature. It’s outside time.
So often the narrative work I see labeled as “queer” moves with such literalism...My definition of queer art is more defined by a work with a radical internal logic that defies the external logic of its form.
Jeremy O Harris
Chance is an opportunity for play. It’s serendipity, it’s luck, it’s surprising. Chance often leads to laughter whether humorous or uncomfortable. Sophia Wang’s film short, Work in Place, and the Maxe Crandall directed - Karla Quintero choreographed performance, STOP PLAY, puncture the reverence of experimentation that’s become canonical to let out the laughing gas necessary to experiment. In Work in Place, Wang performs repetitive acts with frequent collaborator Brontez Purnell. The colors and shapes and repetitions of the set pieces and editing make a postmodern dance PeeWee’s Playhouse. In STOP PLAY, Crandall and Quintero enter with Danny Thanh Nguyen and Julie Moon, all adorned in queer archetype: the leather daddy, the diva, the Parisian effete, the swinging ‘60s go-go dancer. Conceived as a soap opera suite, its balance of playfulness and craft is too delicious to recap. Each of the performers commit to melodrama: Quintero’s gaze as she’s dragged across the floor, Nguyen’s crack of a bullwhip (yes!), Moon’s affected slouch, and Crandall’s acerbic-cum-twee line readings. I wish STOP PLAY were a soap I could tune into every week.
The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.
Josef Albers
Imagining Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a pas de deux, that is Dazaun Soleyn’s (Study)one. Murky lighting and a backlit cyc create spatial density and division. Dancers Claire Fisher and Frankie Lee Peterson III move independent of each other while maintaining a shared energy. We see one dancer in the light and another’s shadow grow and shrink. Is it an echo, a memory? When does the illusion of connection become reality? The brief partnering between Fisher and Peterson is referential to Cunningham’s partnering of support not control. In Moves Cords Names Christy Funsch distills the intersection of legacy, work, and influence. Nol Simonse dances a construction made of “shards” of a 19 year collaboration with Funsch. Courtney Moreno coils up audio cords. Behind them is a projection of Funsch reading aloud the names of “100 people who have positively impacted her dance making,” but will unlikely be celebrated with centennials. The three alchemize into a meditation on time. How memory becomes present. How actions coil and uncoil never ending.
Understand or die.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In a profile on Merce Cunningham and company, dance critic Deborah Jowitt writes of the dancers’ curiosity about Merce after she interviews him. He never shared information about the dances with them beyond the steps and had she learned anything more? She had not. The notorious aloofness of Cunningham the man extends to his dances. There is nothing extra to interpret. What is seen is what is shared. Which is why Alex Escalante’s PARIS is a gift to all Cunningham fans and dance history nerds. Escalante bobs and hustles as his voice-over tells a deeply humanizing anecdote about working as Cunningham’s assistant. The type of mishap ensues that in the moment is peril and with time can be shared with laughter and a quick pulse.
The bond of humanity and risk is at the crux of the Cunningham repertory restaging. Bukowski, Traci Finch, Emily Hansel, and Stacey Yuen dance excerpts from Change of Address (1992), Roaratorio (1983), Fluid Canvas (2002), Scramble (1967), and BIPED (1999) in two parts in the program. The four dancers are strong and technically deft in the demanding movement. They curve, leap, rise, twist, and extend in the signature counterpoint of overlapping speed. Embodying the virtuosity of the Cunningham spine requires more time than a residency allows. Even considering the limits of restaging Cunningham dances the element of his work and legacy I longed for at program’s end is risk. Scroll through the mercetrust Instagram and witness the synthesis of risk and humanity (Holley Farmer’s Loose Time solo). Like spinal acuity there is little time to foster this synthesis in the short term. Yet risk may be what is necessary to keep legacy work from becoming relic. There is a desire for risk in all the works in conversation with Cunningham. Can we see his legacy as more than chances and systems? Can risk be centered without sacrificing integrity? Can we reckon with one artist’s methods beyond integration into our processes? Merce Cunningham’s technique and choreography requires extending beyond accepted limits into new space. As we hold space for legacy I’m confident there will be many more conversations to come.
Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, California. He is the co-director of Wax Poet(s), company member of Dana Lawton Dances, and performs regularly with Oakland Ballet.
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