Grand Master of Movement

Merce Cunningham enters the studio slowly, a legend with scruffy gray hair, a muffler and two canvas tote bags. Inside the large practice space on the top floor of the Westbeth arts complex in New York’s West Village, the current generation of dancers in his company are moving through the self-absorbed ritual of a class in the technique he created. They are wearing the familiar dancer’s motley of practice clothes, with a ‘90s complement of pierced lips and noses, goatees, braids and buzz cuts. Their legs carve the air around them in long sweeping arcs, while their arms and torsos twist and curve in asymmetrical, oddly elegant shapes, sweat dripping, faces blank with concentration. Most of them--graceful, straight-limbed, perfectly conditioned--are in their 20s.

Cunningham, however, is 77.

He has seen five decades of young dancers come and go. Severe arthritis in his feet makes his progress across the studio a slow, painful shuffle and a startling contrast to the company’s easy, virtuosic athleticism. But it is still his dances that set those superb bodies flashing and whirling through space; it is his eye, mind and hand that forms the movement in front of him.

At first, on this misty gray December day, he takes a place at the back of the studio, at a desk half hidden by some droopy potted palms. He is seemingly oblivious to the class that fills the space, absorbed in papers and other business, and he looks up only once, when one of the dancers turns an accidental and loud somersault.

But when it comes time to lead rehearsal, he is sharply present. In just a few weeks, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will embark on its latest national mini-tour, five cities in one month, including stops at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa on Tuesday and the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Saturday.

As he sits in front of the dancers, Cunningham remains quiet and reserved. He watches intently, chin in hand, taking notes on a little pad, but says nothing until the dancers have finished with a particular section. His comments are minimal, his diction is formal and quiet, while he makes small, polite requests to adjust some detail of timing, an entrance cue or the relationship of one group to another.

“Something’s just slightly off there,” he offers, or “Can you just check that?” The dancers respond immediately, rapidly repeating the sequence as they analyze the problem, until Cunningham offers an impassive “Yes, that’s all right now.”

He has an extraordinary eye. As the dancers all do a rapid duet from a 1975 piece called “Changing Steps,” he sits grinning, even laughing, delighted at the near chaos of whirling, falling, leaping, almost-colliding pairs of bodies. But then he picks out a precise lag in a jump by one man that lessens, by a tick, the impact of the next move, which is a catch of his falling partner.

“Dancing is looking,” Cunningham likes to say. After some 50 years of making and looking at dance, he remains perpetually curious about what he may see next, like that sudden flip amid the orderly patterns of a technique class. What motivates him now is exactly what has motivated him all along: the seemingly infinite possibilities of the human body in motion.

“Movement,” Cunningham says, “remains endlessly fascinating to me. Within the scale of the human being there are endless possibilities. And that’s really what interests me, to find something that I don’t know about and find a way to use it.”

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Since he presented his first solo concert in a New York loft in 1944, Cunningham’s tireless quest to find and use what he doesn’t know about has revolutionized people’s thinking about what is possible in making and looking at dance.

In breaking with the modern dance’s doyenne of drama, Martha Graham, with whom he performed from 1939 to 1944, Cunningham linked dance with cutting-edge ideas of randomness and abstraction and simultaneity. He declared dance independent of story or meaning, independent of music, to be looked at purely for itself.

“For me, it seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen is what it is,” he wrote in a 1952 essay. For him to attach meaning to a moving body would be like trying to explain the sun coming up and the rain coming down, a notion that both diminished and distorted their wonder. “Dancing,” he wrote, “is a visible action of life.”

Cunningham formed his first company in 1953, and together with experimental composer John Cage, his domestic partner and collaborator, began making works in which dance, music and decor are conceived and presented as separate elements, sharing time and space during a performance but not integrated in the usual manner. He used chance formulas, often from the ancient Chinese spiritual text the I Ching, to construct pieces, searching for connections beyond what his own mind might invent, and worked with some of the foremost contemporary composers and visual artists of the times: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Robert Ashley, as well as Cage.

Works like “Suite for Five in Time and Space” (1956), with its composition by chance and complete reorientation of the stage space; “Winterbranch” (1964), with its screaming La Monte Young score and flashing lights; or 1968’s “Rainforest,” with the dancers squirming like strange fish among Warhol’s silver helium pillows, shocked and challenged audiences and critics. People hated or supported his work passionately. What you thought of Cunningham, wrote critic and essayist Richard Kostelanetz of his early days, showed not only what you thought of dance but of contemporary art in general.

In the ‘50s, Cunningham was performing for tiny audiences and mostly being reviled by critics. But by the mid-’60s, though still considered very much in the vanguard, both critics and audiences were beginning to catch up. In 1974, Calvin Tomkins of the New Yorker wrote: “Far more than any other choreographer in our time, Cunningham has pursued the difficult goal of a true synthesis of the arts, and the manner of his doing so, I believe, has a bearing not only on his own remarkable career but on the development of 20th century art.”

Since the early ‘80s, Cunningham has become a veritable dance world icon, heaped with accolades, honors and bookings. Successive generations of post- and post-post-modern choreographers and performers have built on, imitated, abandoned and taken for granted Cunningham’s ideas. But even now, his dances can still challenge and confound.

When the company goes on tour, a common query in post-performance question and answer sessions remains “Why don’t you dance to the music?” And journalists still ask the same questions they’ve been asking since the beginning of his career.

“You’re not going to ask him all those questions people ask him all the time, are you?” Robert Swinston, at 17 years with the company its senior member, asks a press visitor to the studio indignantly. “The ones about space and time and why doesn’t he work with music?”

These days, Cunningham keeps a monk-like schedule. He comes in to the company’s Westbeth headquarters six mornings a week to do yoga and exercises by himself. Two mornings are devoted to choreography, largely computer assisted. He has lunch (pita bread, peanut butter, raisins, hummus), and rehearses with the company five afternoons a week. He often teaches the company class, and even the occasional class at his dance school, the Merce Cunningham Studio. Efforts to get him to take two days off on the weekends have been unsuccessful, and he shakes his head at the idea. “Oh, no,” he says. “Always here.”

Even his interaction with his dancers carries a bit of monk-like reserve. When not giving them practical directives, for instance, he often offers them Zen-like parables, anecdotes from which his listeners must extract their own meaning, much as with his dances. Like the one he tells about a mahogany tree in his loft that hadn’t grown a new shoot or lost a leaf in over a year. One day, as he was doing yoga, he noticed a new sprig on the tree, and suddenly leaves were falling off. Change is always imminent--the message seems to be--anything can happen at any time.

His dancers relate to him less as friends and colleagues than as students--across a respectful distance. Bill Cook, the director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, the umbrella organization for the company, school and the Cunningham historical archives, remembers that after he came to work there, Cunningham told him, “I’m so glad you’re here, because now the dancers will have someone to talk to.”

The distance is due, certainly, to the difference in age and to the fact that the majority of the dancers are relatively new to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. But it may also be in part because, since 1989, he has been choreographing primarily with a computer program called Life Forms, rather than on his own or his dancers’ bodies in the studio. The idea, once again, is to exploit potential. “It’s added possibilities,” Cunningham says of Life Forms. “Complexity. I see possibilities that I realize have always been in dance, but I never found a way or never saw them before.”

The program consists of flexible three-dimensional humanoid figures that Cunningham can manipulate in any way and view from any angle using a mouse or keyboard, allowing him to create complex sequences and combinations of movements entirely on screen. On a practical level, it has allowed him to keep working when his body cannot.

Again, he emphasizes the process of discovery Life Forms has made possible. “In the beginning, I made an enormous number of errors and would lose things constantly, but it didn’t matter to me,” he says. “I didn’t feel I was out to accomplish something. I was rather out, as I still am, to discover something.”

Occasionally, his mistakes allowed Cunningham to do things that Life Form’s creators, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, didn’t know the program could do; prompting an advisor whom they sent periodically to work with him to ask, “How did you do that?”

Working with the computer has, by most accounts, intensified aspects of Cunningham’s abstract style, adding newly complex movement patterns and shapes. He says it has allowed him to experiment more freely with visual points of view, and to add complexity in the upper body and the arms. “It was all possibilities that were always there,” he says. “But I was involved with other kinds of thinking in the earlier dances, space and time and movement.”

Recent computer-developed dances like “Rondo,” “Ground Level Overlay” (both of which the company will perform in Orange County, along with the 1975 “Soundance”), and the monumental “Ocean” (which had its U.S. premiere at UC Berkeley in April 1996) are remarkable for their lush sense of endlessly mutating form. Reviews of these pieces tend to use words like “beautiful,” “sculptural” and “lavish.”

Cunningham still demonstrates his computer-composed phrases to the company himself, and then comes a process of putting the dance together in real time and space. Here he depends on his eye, those specific and courtly comments and the company’s ability to make what he’s created on screen work on their bodies, however they can.

“He really just lets you do it,” says dancer Jeannie Steele. “He mostly gives us the rhythm, the legs, then the arms and the back. With quality, it’s mostly simple [instructions]--harder, faster, slower, retard there, speed up.”

“He gives you a lot of freedom,” says another dancer Banu Ogan. “We’re famous for that.”

A great change for Cunningham came in 1992, with the death of John Cage. The two not only lived together for more than 40 years, they were so closely linked creatively that as artists their names were often spoken as a unit--Cage-Cunningham. Together, they developed such concepts as the use of chance and the equality of music and dance. Indeed, those ideas were expressed as much in Cage’s music as in Cunningham’s dances. Cage was musical director and an integral part of Cunningham’s company until his death, and people who were close to them say the more outgoing and charismatic Cage tended to dominate their private and social life.

Still, as difficult as Cage’s death has been for Cunningham, he has remained as productive as ever, making two pieces each year, while the company has continued to tour frequently. He seems to have taken comfort in his work; he came into the studio the day after Cage’s death. In fact, the end of the close relationship with that powerful personality may have opened doors for him. “John’s death freed my work,” Cunningham told the San Francisco Examiner in a 1995 interview. “We used to discuss everything. Now I make all the decisions.”

“It’s sort of as though you had this father of abstract philosophy sitting at the dinner table all the time,” says Cook. “I think Merce’s work now comes from loneliness, but also from the freedom to be his own person.”

Cunningham reacts uncomfortably, stiffening and pausing, to the question of whether his work has changed since Cage’s passing, as if such an admission might imply some rejection of their work together.

“Change--I always think change is like additions,” he says finally. “I don’t think we lose anything else. We may not use it all the time, but it’s there.”

Change, of course, is a necessary byproduct of Cunningham’s desire to keep exploring. It makes him a good fit with the Information Age, as his affinity for the computer indicates. Indeed, he says technology and its attendant culture may be helping the rest of us to catch up with his vision, may even cut down on all those questions about meaning and chance.

“Dancing is about seeing,” he explains for the umpteenth time. “And I think so much of life now is about looking. I keep bringing this up to people and they all agree with me so far. Children have grown up looking at the television, and what’s that word? Scroll? Surfing, yes. The children don’t listen, they simply look. That is, their eye is taking in something but not their ear. And it’s a wholly different way of being.”

In fact, he thinks this image and information laden world, where we have grown accustomed to absorbing a multiplicity of unrelated facts, might even help people to absorb something like one of his Events, which he started doing in the early ‘60s. An Event links varying chunks from any of nine or 10 dances, put together according to the shape of the space and chance procedures on the day of the performance (the company will do an Event in Glendale, in which Cunningham will likely perform).

Bewildering as this might sound to some, Cunningham thinks it should be no more complex or confusing for his audiences than such everyday miracles as a television simulcast of something happening on the other side of the world, or the flood of text and images on the Internet.

“What people don’t catch--some do, I don’t doubt--is that everything is fragmented in a way,” Cunningham says. “Maybe that’s why they can’t see it in another form, I don’t know, but the society is so fragmented, everything about how we have to work is so fragmented.” Such drastic fragmentation must, he believes “affect the way we think. And I see no reason why it shouldn’t affect the way one makes a dance.”

And, as the generations and the changes keep coming, Cunningham keeps finding reasons and new ways to make dances. “There’s so much repetition, certainly in dancing, if you get bogged down in that it’s really very boring. But so much of life is like that. So that’s why, like in cooking, it’s wonderful if you can see another way, some other kind of feeling, different tastes.

“I really feel this very strongly, though it’s not easy, that you may find something that you don’t know about. Even though you’re doing the same thing, you may find out something about it which is not quite the same.”

Cunningham, who has been talking during a rehearsal break, looks up and smiles as his dancers reassemble.

“Begin again,” he says, “that’s what we’re always doing, is beginning again.”

And does he never get tired of beginning again?

“Well, it’s what you have to do every day,” he laughs. “So why not do it in dancing if you can?”

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* Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesday, 8 p.m. $15-$45. (213) 365-3500. Also at the Alex Theater, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Saturday, 8 p.m. $22.50-$32.50. (800) 233-3123.