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Merce Cunningham Dance Company

By Zachary Whittenburg:

Art's treasure is its immortality, a constancy with which it communicates with generations past, present and future. Assuming responsible custody of the work, one doesn't just look at a painting or sculpture, but through its creator's eyes. That thought was on my mind as I watched one of four sold-out shows by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Columbia College's Dance Center - having passed away at 90 in late July, my focus was as much on the choreographer as on Chicago Event 1, which I saw Saturday afternoon before a large painting and silkscreen by Robert Rauschenberg.

Just thirteen dancers were the medium through which I experienced Cunningham's visions of movement, who transferred images from microscopic to epic. Striding into place in darkness, the lights rose on an asymmetrically-arranged ensemble that looked ready to begin George Balanchine's "Serenade" but, as dancers began moving an equal number would exit - we were shown the potential of scale but told unequivocally we would wait to experience its heft. The fluidity with which Cunningham's Events - montages of excerpts from throughout his career - fuse duets into quartets and new into old testifies not only to his unparalleled hand at composition but the cohesiveness of his ouevre. I'm not familiar enough to know when I was watching a sextet from 1960 or a group dance from 1993, but it didn't seem to matter; Cunningham's journey as an artist shows logic both linearly and fractally.

And musically: Columbia College Associate Chair and professor Richard Woodbury collaborated with MCDC's music director Takehisa Kosugi on a score for Chicago that was a sonic triptych of construction. Sounds in the first third suggested arrangement and preparation of tools, intensely-visual clankings and rustlings in advance of some grand project built from parts collected throughout a lifetime. As Chicago Event 1 continued, Woodbury and Kosugi moved the frame onto this contraption's sputter into life, the 75-minute piece closing on the static and whirring of its self-aware function (which included Woodbury accompanying the dancers live, his keyboard notes run through software blending it with the pre-composed component). Their work wasn't to everyone's taste but I thought it both beautiful and appropriate, and lengthy pauses of silence showed a willingness to include the absence of sound- beloved by Cunningham's partner John Cage - as a key element.

It's hard to believe the extent to which chance operations figured into Cunningham's dancemaking: his works contain moments of such poetry one almost has to conclude that surrender to life's randomness is the only entree to the divine. One section for four dancers without a shred of unison felt cohesive regardless; in the same way Jean-Paul Gaultier combines plaids, paisleys, polka dots and pinstripes in inexplicable harmony, so Cunningham took phrases of movement sharing no discernable common qualities and, with the intangible similarities bleeding through, showed why so many painters and visual artists felt a bond with his work.

Other moments displayed the unreal technical standard of the last generation to be coached by Mr. Cunningham: memorably, three loping runs by a duet hand-in-hand fell between their en l'air turns off one foot, one 180? and the other 540?. After three more runs they'd do it again, swapping the degree of their rotations. I fell in love with the sound of their landings: when his choreography calls for jumps, they go straight up and straight down- there's no disguising the truth of a body's weight. Chicago Event 1's only lengthy solo was danced by Andrea Weber, and it displayed another intruiging aspect of Cunningham's work. Architectural and abstract as it is, you can see (especially at a venue as intimate as the Dance Center) the fallible, fatigued body fighting within the pure structures of theory's constructions. I was mesmerized by Weber's trembling muscles - they became a thousand symbols of the gulf between modernism's idealism and human limitations. Of the rest of the spectacular ensemble, kudos go to Rashaun Mitchell and Jennifer Goggans, although all made an impression.

Chicago Event 1 ended in finale form. Proudly and joyfully, all thirteen dancers swept around the stage before their humble bow and well-deserved standing ovation. Cunningham's work is alive, perhaps more than ever, and his eyes will see as long as it is faithfully staged and performed.

Reviewed by Zachary Whittenburg on 10/05/2009 at 11:12 AM