Dance : Second Cunningham Program at Royce

Beyond the pleasure of watching superbly accomplished dancing, the Friday program by the Merce Cunningham company in Royce Hall, UCLA, offered three contrasting examples of how choreographic structure can influence (or heighten) basic movement values.

In “Cargo X” (1989), for example, Cunningham used the repositioning and decoration of a wooden ladder as a structural device--with the dancers sometimes getting lifted and carried as if they too were pieces of furniture, and issues of physical support extremely prominent in the interaction of the seven cast members.

The accompaniment, “Spectra” by Takehisa Kosugi, began with ratcheting and burbling sounds, then incorporated women’s voices and, later, men’s, in an atmospheric mix.

“August Pace” (1989) featured a backdrop by Sergei Bugaev with numbered rows of pictographs--the numbers (though not the images) corresponding to the seven men in white and seven women in black onstage. (An eighth woman wore half-black, half-white, divided vertically.)

A series of duets formed the building blocks of this complex, virtuosic piece, with drastic balance challenges increasingly the issue of the partnerships. Michael Pugliese’s rhythmic score, “Peace Talks,” incorporated live and recorded instruments from many world cultures.

In the familiar “Pictures” (1984), Cunningham turned dance passages into visual artifacts by freezing the action and adjusting the light until we saw only stark silhouettes. This emphasis on pose also extended to the chain-linkups between the 15 dancers and other formal pictorial elements--as well as the steady, sumptuous lyricism of the movement style.

The delicacy of the music (David Behrman’s “Interspecies Smalltalk”) also helped make “Pictures” one of Cunnigham’s most magical creations.