His one constant: change

Merce CUNNINGHAM once said his dances are derived from questions. On the 50th anniversary of his company -- to be celebrated at UCLA next week -- my question is: How has he changed?

I was 12 when I first attended a Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance -- “RainForest,” 1968, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Cunningham and Carolyn Brown in it, and several huge, floating, half-filled-with-helium Mylar pillows designed by Andy Warhol. Here’s what I remember: tilts, lunges, and bodies flat as planks, leaning. Cunningham saw, or he made me see, not just the body as points in space, but motion as points in space.

I lost innocence and, in a sense, I gained it. I saw past the body’s lines and flesh into the bones and structure. The spine for Cunningham was architecture. He and Brown -- perhaps in the shapes of an X, T or L -- were abstractions, yet they sent shockwaves of feeling. Few danced like these two. They were so beautiful. But how do you reconcile beauty with abstraction?

The title “RainForest” provided a clue. In a forest, do you ask what the orchid means? Those Warhol pillows would not bounce in the same direction each night. Would you expect the wind to blow the same way twice? Dance happens in time and space; it is always changing, random, never fixed -- like life. The revelation! The more you think like Cunningham, the more you live like Cunningham -- and the more you’re alive, period.

He gave us permission to look at dance no differently than we observe nature: without preconception or expectation. But just try hanging on to that kind of -- what I call scientific -- innocence. For 50 years, Cunningham has, and yet not without a fight.

Lincoln Kirstein, the progenitor of classical American dance with George Balanchine, respectfully submitted in 1971 that Cunningham would not last. He said he was all about “instant and constant ‘innovation.’ ”

Kirstein couldn’t see how Cunningham could survive without attaching himself to music. Cunningham, though aligned with John Cage, detached himself from music. Often the opening night would be the first time dancers would hear the score or know the order of a choreography’s sections, determined by chance -- perhaps the toss of a coin.

Cunningham’s adherence to the I Ching and chance operations is now accepted in the dance world. Then, it was weird, an approach that seemed dangerously susceptible to intuition, instead of secured by skill and design.

But Cunningham was smart. His art possessed logic. The randomness of his actions did not appear to be completely random. It’s fair to say the dance world has had its doubts about Cunningham. And we have been proven wrong. The UCLA program provides an extraordinary opportunity to see why. Works from the company’s five decades are on three programs. A world premiere -- “MinEvent,” with the Kronos Quartet performing a piece Cage wrote for it -- and the presence of Cunningham, age 83, onstage reading the text for Cage’s “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run” (1965) are testament to how he has changed.

He is older. Nothing else. The master of change continually changes, so that he seems not to change at all. The only thing I wonder when I look at his work now is, what question is he asking this time?

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Sasha Anawalt is dance critic for KCRW-FM (89.9) in Santa Monica.

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Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood

When: Next Thursday-Feb. 1, 8 p.m.

Cost: $15 to $50

Info: (310) 825-2101