DEFINING MERCE CUNNINGHAM

Merce Cunningham’s interest in stripping dance down to its essentials--bodies moving through space and time--enables his choreography to simultaneously appeal on abstract and human levels.

At 68, he adheres to the belief that “movement is expressive by and of itself. You have to find a way to do it fully, whether it’s a simple or complex movement.

“By simple I don’t mean simple-minded. Say you’re only moving your hand: to make that seem as large as a large leap. You have to zero in on it to find out what it is you’re doing.”

What, indeed? In each of his newest pieces to be seen in Royce Hall, UCLA, Friday and Saturday--”Points in Space,” “Fabrications” and “Shards”--surely Cunningham is attempting to answer more of the precise physical questions he’s been asking over four decades of choreography.

Cunningham himself can’t help but be exposed in the process, though he ultimately ignores the inevitable intrusion of his own personality on his art.

“I think no matter what you do or make,” he says, “it comes from whatever you are. You can say it’s public, but it’s also private. You don’t need to be explicit and say ‘This is how my father died’ and so on, but it comes out of you.

“I don’t particularly think of excluding myself (from the dances). But it’s possible I put them together in a way that allows other things to come in.”

“Points in Space,” an adaptation of the video he and film maker Elliot Caplan shot for the BBC in London last year, takes his self-effacing approach to an extreme. Although he puts in a brief and telling cameo appearance in the video, he says he wanted “something slightly different” for the stage version:

“I thought, ‘Well, how can I do that? If I don’t get in it, (then) it will be different!’ ” Out went Cunningham’s solo. In its place he concocted a duet for company veterans Catherine Kerr and Alan Good.

Cunningham isn’t given to manufacturing a Garbo-like mystique about himself or his work. Indeed, he’s always willing to talk about choreographic nuts and bolts.

He’s less easy to pin down when it comes to ascribing any particular psycho-emotional meaning to his works. And among his dancers, he is notorious for keeping mum about his motives.

“We all have maybe our own little stories,” Kerr says when asked what, if anything, the company learns about a given dance’s background during its making.

“We all say, ‘I heard this’ and ‘Well, I heard that.’ We hear different things at different times. You try to grab at whatever you can. Most of us never have any idea of what a piece’s flavor is until after it’s made.

“This is why Merce is so protective about a new piece: Every dance needs to find its own shape. If you say ‘This is about this ,’ immediately you limit it.”

“Titles can be clues,” she suggests. Take the full-company “Fabrications” and chamber-sized “Shards.”

Cunningham came across the word fabrications while reading “Finnegan’s Wake,” a work that he and composer John Cage have previously turned to for inspiration.

“That’s the kind of word I like,” Cunningham exclaims. “It has two meanings. It may have more, but there are certainly two: to fabricate something, and also a fabrication is a lie.” The dancing itself, he notes, is composed of “fairly long phrases and fast phrases. It shifts in and out of space.”

Cunningham’s bare-bones description is at odds with the subjective responses that “Fabrications” has already earned. Guillermo Resto, an ardent Cunningham fan who has danced with Mark Morris’ and Susan Marshall’s companies, sums up the dance as being akin to open-heart surgery. He might have taken his cue from designer Dove Bradshaw’s backdrop for the piece: a collage of ventricular cavities and machine-like valves.

“Shards” falls into two of the three usually overlapping categories that some observers cast Cunningham’s dances into: dances about dance, dances that suggest drama and those that are of a whimsical nature. But “Shards” is anything but whimsical.

“The way the world’s societies exist now,” Cunningham says, “so many things are falling apart, so many people are having troubles of multiple kinds, so many seem separated. ‘Shards’ must come from all that kind of thinking.”

“Shards” also has a good deal to say--or show--about the deceptive nature of stillness. “I made a gamut of movements which are static,” Cunningham recalls, “although when I look at ‘Shards,’ it doesn’t seem static. There’s always something moving; you catch it out of the corner of your eye.

“The word shards means fragments, bits and pieces of things,” Cunningham explains. He says he found additional impetus for this piece from the word palimpsest , a term he recently discovered. It is normally defined as something that has been written upon several times, with remnants of the earlier, erased writing still visible.

How did Cunningham translate this word into movement? “One dancer may do a whole phrase and another may do a slight part of it. That’s part of the structure of the piece, its palimpsest.”

Cunningham has a centrally placed solo in “Fabrications” but doesn’t appear in “Shards.” The limitations of age and the demands of dance-making increasingly curtail his performance time. “But there’s something about going out on stage,” he says.

“It’s not that you put a mask on. Theater has a heightened awareness; it’s focused. You’re being looked at by people. Actually, you’re being looked at by people all the time, as far as that goes. You’re also looking at them,” he adds, chuckling ruminatively.

“But you’re doing another kind of thing as well as you can. You do more than that, you go beyond that. I keep trying to put the dancers in positions where they might have to do something further. I mean, simply working with dancing, you have a way of dealing with time, which is incredibly mysterious. At the same time it can have some kind of magic.”