Sense That Defies Logic

Last year, Merce Cunningham was lured back to acting. He played Erik Satie, the quirky French composer, who was made to seem all the more quirky given that the play’s text, from his writings, was assembled by chance procedures. The piece, “Alphabet,” was a staging of a radio play by John Cage, Cunningham’s creative and life partner.

After a performance at UCLA, when I complimented him on making Satie completely irresistible, Cunningham raised his eyebrows in mock horror. The lines were almost impossible to memorize, he protested. He was a dancer, not an actor.

“What about your student days in theater?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “but that was performing playwrights like Chekhov. And they made sense!”

This week at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, Cunningham begins a 1 1/2-year celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of his company in 1953. It has been an exceptional run for a radical artist tirelessly exploring dance with no story, no symbolism, no specified emotional character, no center.

Over the years, he has been admired and scorned, but seldom has he been accused of making sense--not, anyway, in the way that most people think about dance.

No one throws tomatoes at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company anymore (as they once did in Paris nearly 40 years ago). But even after half a century, it still goes against convention that the choreographer and his dancers work apart from music, that the dances are conceived and rehearsed in silence. The music, along with the decor, arrives at the dress rehearsal or first performance. And Cunningham’s penchant for using chance procedures to order movement still strikes people as a scary, nonsensical way to make art.

In 1968, the cover of the Saturday Evening Post was taken up by a stark photograph of Cunningham, his face painted half white, half red. “Who is this man?” the headline read, as if he were an alien from another planet.

The image of Cunningham has softened considerably of late. His white hair an Einsteinian tangle, he has, at 83, a sagacious, avuncular presence.

He is regularly hailed as the world’s greatest living choreographer: Then-President Francois Mitterand made him a Chevalier of France’s Legion of Honor; the first President Bush awarded him the National Medal of the Arts. His portrait hangs in the company of Elvis, Marilyn and Jackie in the Warhol show at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Yet the question persists. Who is this man? And another: How is it possible that Cunningham has managed to survive and finally thrive after 50 uncompromising years in the avant-garde, that ever-shrinking tributary in the flood of mainstream popular culture?

I first saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at UCLA in 1963 and have seen it hundreds of times since. I first met him formally about a dozen years ago, requesting interviews for a book on Cage. It was just the kind of imposition Merce hates, and he was cool in response. But he warmed. Now the chats are informal, over occasional meals and social gatherings, and, once, we shared a train ride from Brussels to Bonn. Mutual friends keep me up to date.

That, of course, hardly qualifies me as a Mercist, as dance critic Anna Kisselgoff once dubbed the faithful. I’m an unsophisticated outsider in the dance world. I don’t have a good memory for movement. Given how complex some of his dances can be, I often watch pieces I’ve seen many times as if for the first time.

Still, even my fragmentary view is enough to persuade me of this: Not only do Merce and his work make sense, but it is the kind of sense that really matters. And it is the secret of his genius, longevity and, now, celebrity.

One thing you have to know about Merce is that he is essentially a naturalist. Take a look at his drawings, just published in “Other Animals: Drawings and Journals.” He began making sketches about 20 years ago on the road in Los Angeles, whiling away a travel delay by sketching a tree. He said the result was terrible, but he had become so engrossed in looking at the tree that the time passed in an instant. From that moment on, he was hooked.

Now he sketches as daily discipline in his journal, and also makes more formal color-pen drawings of the natural world he encounters on the road and of animals he finds in books. The style is somewhere between, say, Audubon and Saul Steinberg. To me, these wonderful drawings--an adorable reindeer, quizzical giraffe and goofy, self-possessed birds and insects--are idealized Cunningham dancers. In these superb, mysterious creatures, we can see ourselves and something completely outside of ourselves.

It is therefore ironic that for a long time his dances were interpreted as depersonalized and unnatural simply because they evade narrative and embrace randomness. In fact, Merce’s dances, just like his animals, personify nature--mysterious, unpredictable (the function of chance)--as seen through the human eye, as rendered by the human touch.

I remember him once talking of his father, who practiced law in Centralia, Wash., where Merce was born and raised.

“The only thing he liked better than law,” Merce said, his delivery punctuated by theatrical flourishes and exclamations, “was more law.” As he laughed at the absurdity of that, his face registered affection and admiration, as well as acknowledgment that he could never have followed in his father’s footsteps, as both of his brothers did.

He was a popular kid in Centralia, but escaping the confines--of a small town, of usual ideas about being in the theater--became his metier. He left Centralia for Seattle and then New York City. Once in New York, he got his start as a spectacularly virtuosic dancer in Martha Graham’s company in the 1940s. In that milieu, he was clearly acquainted with choreography as a vehicle for psychological probing, and he was good at it. But that, too, proved confining. He wanted real liberation.

Merce formed his own company out of a workshop at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, in the summer of 1953. At the same time, Cage had begun to devise a method to widen the scope of music, bringing in indeterminate elements by tossing coins and consulting the Chinese oracle, the I Ching, to determine details of a score. The result was like viewing the night sky, where a large impression is gathered from noting the random placement of the stars.

With Cage as the music director for his company, Merce discovered that he could make use of chance procedures, within reason, in creating movements--you can’t have the dancers bumping into each other. It was also only natural to “liberate” the dance from the music, as well.

“Slavery is abolished,” Cage proclaimed of this new autonomy.

Indeed, it is. Not only is the choreographer provided a greater sense of freedom, but the spectator is unburdened as well. As someone more attuned to music than dance, for instance, I don’t always like the way conventional dance attempts to control the way I listen to music.

Natural as the urge to dance to music may be, we, in the modern world, are equally comfortable moving with music that is an independent soundtrack in our lives. Music meant to suggest one thing is very often playing while we are thinking or doing something unconnected to it. You may have music on the stereo right now that has nothing to do with what you are reading.

The other great advantage of dance that is independent of music or narrative is that you don’t have to know what is going on to like it.

Traditional ballet, and even some modern dance, operates through a language of visual codes that must be learned and that require a significant suspension of disbelief. By now, I’m pretty good at following the way dance expresses the story of “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake,” but I’m still not so sure about “The Firebird.” I sort of know what Martha Graham was saying in her dances, but not what each phrase means. Balanchine and Mark Morris cleverly illuminate musical gesture and structure, but even with those choreographers I find myself worrying about what those dance phrases are signifying.

All you need to appreciate the Cunningham company, however, is a pair of eyes and an open (or even better, empty) mind. You look as you would at animals in their habitat, as you would at street life from an outdoor cafe.

Just as music’s independence from dance makes sense in that it replicates real life, it also makes sense as a way to collaborate. In fact, liberation is possible because Merce has been able to set up ideal conditions of trust and knowledge, where collaborators don’t impose too strongly on each other.

This may account for the army of creative people who have signed on to serve with Merce over the past 50 years: from artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who have provided the company with costumes and sets and general artistic direction, to a host of composers in addition to Cage--Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Ashley, along with an occasional pop musician such as Brian Eno.

Perhaps the best way to understand the way it works is to look at the rare occasion when something goes wrong.

Although Christian Wolff, a composer who began working with Cage in 1950, often wrote music successfully for the Cunningham company, he once let his politics get in the way. Instead of the abstract music he had normally supplied, he used songs with adamant left-wing texts. He said the moment the performance began, he realized that it was a mistake, that the music, in effect, shouted down the dancers.

Although Cage and Merce never actually said so, Wolff felt that they had thought this a kind of betrayal, that he had missed his cues. Merce may work outside of the music, but he willingly discusses the general tone of a work with his collaborators and welcomes them to rehearsals.

Still, the musical faux pas also nicely illustrates the kind of thrilling drama that only a first night with his company can provide. (The composer, incidentally, was soon forgiven; Merce’s newest work, “Loose Time,” which will be performed next week at Lincoln Center and at UCLA on Jan. 31, has a new score by Wolff.)

More typical with Merce, however, is the way music that one might not expect to work, in fact, does.

La Monte Young’s score “2 Sounds,” for “Winterbranch,” a violent dance of falling bodies from 1964, is legend. It includes the sound of ashtrays scraped against a mirror and wood rubbed against a gong; both are amplified to excruciating volume. Although this was what provoked the tomatoes in France, it also provoked audiences everywhere to come to terms with the meaning of violence in American culture.

I discovered how close the dancer could feel toward composers when I was riding with him to a concert in 1996. I blurted out something about Toru Takemitsu’s death a week earlier, assuming that he surely had heard about it. But he had been traveling and the news had missed him. His face turned ashen, and he said hardly a word for the rest of the evening.

Such emotion from a practitioner of the coolly abstract should come as no surprise. By not telling you what to feel, when you see the dancers and hear the music, there is nothing you can’t feel.

Which brings us back to what makes sense: to Merce the naturalist, distilling and animating raw nature, human and animal. And to the power of liberation, which when we achieve it, we like to call exhilaration.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.