Keeping the movement pure

For half a century now, many high muckety-mucks in the dance establishment have hated Merce Cunningham. He simply changed too much of the status quo in 20th century choreography and left too much of what existed before him looking tired and insufficient.

The ballet crowd hated him because he insisted on redefining star power as a quality that can belong to every fine dancer and virtuosity as technical feats more complex and new-minted than just another sequence of formula air turns or a big jump projected in the audience’s teeth.

Instead, Cunningham virtuosity became something to be continually updated -- most recently with the help of computer animation. At UCLA on Thursday you could find his dancers looking impossibly accomplished in the ensemble piece “Loose Time,” striking difficult balances in extension, then suddenly snapping, tilting, dropping their upper torsos as if one half of the body could explore extreme changes without disturbing the other half. Stand in the middle of your living room and try it -- if your medical insurance is paid up.

The Royce Hall engagement, which ends tonight, celebrates the Cunningham company’s 50th anniversary but, all by itself, this 2002 work told you everything you needed to know about the flow of powerful yet uninsistent innovation that his dancers have always embodied.

Wearing gleaming, textured black body suits by Terry Winters, they often created a computer game or hall-of-mirrors swarm effect, as if reflecting a single impulse or design, but they also swept into so many displays of individual excellence that you longed to know their names. Music by Christian Wolff punctuated the dancing, but foot rhythm alone kept the pulse of the piece youthful and spirited.

Because Cunningham resolutely avoids storytelling, social commentary, self-dramatization and subservience to music, the modern dance crowd has hated him too: His vision of the independence and fascination of pure movement seems to threaten those who don’t get much from dance unless it leans on other kinds of art. He also has a maddening habit of undercutting his own authority as auteur by chopping his works into free-form full-evening cavalcades that he calls “events,” to let the movement speak in new contexts.

A one-act “MinEvent” on Thursday, for instance, enlisted the Kronos Quartet to play music by John Cage during excerpts from Cunningham’s “Installations,” “Scenario” and “Ocean,” along with new choreographic material. Against a Robert Rauschenberg scenic panel, the full 16-member company took turns dancing and posing, with individuals sometimes serving as a sculpture garden for one another, elsewhere racing through playful motion gambits.

Tiny torso pivots and shifts of position, partnering switcheroos, mass outbreaks of reaching-in-backbend as if picking fruit off a tree -- it all coalesced in an extended, buoyant quintet of tag-team unisons: steady, happy, richly detailed modern dance.

Dating from 1956 to 1958, “Suite for Five” represented the oldest work of the UCLA engagement, a collaboration with Cage that emphasized the juxtaposition of radically different energy states.

Alternately surging, skittering, drumming the floor, Daniel Roberts, Jeannie Steele and Cheryl Therrien looked bucolic in different ways, while Derry Swan proved lyrical and serene and Cedric Andrieux sustained a sense of caution and even danger, as if feeling his way over thin ice in the dark.

Whatever the mood or attack, these dancers presented themselves in sculptural positions as rigidly formal as those in ancient Egyptian art. Swan seemed the most rounded, Andrieux the most flattened, so their duet together became as strange and ultimately magical as an encounter between creatures from parallel universes.

It’s easy to love Cunningham at moments like this: At 83 he remains an icon of change and renewal, with old works and new challenging us to see beyond our preconceptions to new avenues of expression. The assumption that dance must continually move forward still gets some people angry, but it got the people at Royce Hall on their feet Thursday for the first standing ovation of the Cunningham weekend.

Besides the Kronos Quartet, the musicians Thursday included Takehisa Kosugi, company music director, Krys Bobrowski and Wolff.

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Merce Cunningham’s 50th anniversary

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood

When: Tonight, 8 p.m.

Price: $15-$50

Contact: (310) 825-2101