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preparation. Both Alley and Feld will be back with their dancers for two weeks each in the Academy’s wonderful old opera house. Getting to Brooklyn may be a drag, but once there, at Lichtenstein’s festival, it’s a gas! (Walter Terry)

a kind of anarchy When an artist who has been revered for twenty years within a small and dedicated circle achieves, rather suddenly and with no relaxation of his own esthetic standards, a much larger following and a reputation as one of the cultural glories of an inglorious era, it is reasonable to assume that something has happened to his audience. At the New York premiere of his Variations V in 1965, Merce Cunningham and his dance company were still “difficult” enough to send half the fashionable audience scurrying for the exits of Philharmonic Hall. Two years later, when the company was booked on relatively short notice to perform at the fading old Brooklyn Academy of Music, a soldout house responded with such joyous enthusiasm to his program that the academy’s manager subsequently decided to inaugurate a full season of dance and invited Cunningham’s troupe to become a resident company there. What had happened? In Brooklyn, it was noted, the audience that came to see Cunningham was a surprisingly youthful one. The implication was that a whole new generation had discovered his work and found it immediately comprehensible in their own terms. What is it that the young—and a growing number of older enthusiasts as well—find so compelling in the work of this “sea-green incorruptible avantgardist,” as critic Clive Barnes has called him? Cunningham himself finds it difficult to describe the particular quality of his from of dance. “I suppose it is different," he said the other day, “because when I go and look at someone else work I always feel, well, yes, what we do is not like that. But I'm never sure just what it is that we do do!" Cunningham pnce said, however, that his primary concern has always been with human activity, ordinary gesture, “making continuity out of human gesture”; that his work is “predicated on

the notion of individuals moving and coming together.” Not heroes, not emotions or states of mind, but individuals. One of the pleasures of watching this remarkable company, which in its present composition numbers twelve dancers (six women and six men) including Cunningham, is that each member is to some degree a soloist, a dancer whose training and development is concentrated on the projection of a unique, personal style. Carolyn Brown, who has been with Cunningham since 1953 and whom several critics rank among the finest dancers at iwork today in any company, is an elegant perfectionist, a magnificently secure and intelligent dancer who can make the whole shape of a complex phrase immediately and brilliantly apparent: Sandra Neels, long-legged and intense, has a softer, more supple quality that makes her seem, at moments, touchingly alone onstage. Each of the others, once seen, is immediately recognizable on reappearance. Cunningham, whose agile, quirky, offhand grace is probably inimitable anyway, has otten said that he “does not want everybody to dance like me.” Watching these supremely concentrated dancers is an experience unlike anything else in the field of dance. The effect, as the composer John Cage once wrote, is “to introduce an audience, not to a specialized world of art, but to the open, unpredictably changing world of everyday living,” and it is this world that all the Cunningham dances, in all their astonishing variousness, have always inhabited. Individuals moving and coming together. "If you have three days to make a duet,” Cunningham said, referring to the origin of his Night Wandering in Stockholm in 1958, “do you worry about ideas, or do you make a dance involving two people, a man and a woman, together?” To reach his own form of movement, Cunningham drew heavily from the two predominant (and at that time opposed) fountainheads of American dance. From Martha Graham, in whose company he was a featured soloist from 1940 to 1945, he took the contraction-and-release technique of body articulation and expanded it laterally, to create a large, space-filling kind of movement whose base is the dancer’s strong and flexible spine, in those early years Cunningham also studied, and later taught, at Balanchine's School of American Ballet. What he took from Balanchine was ballet's speed, grace, and athleticism, without the rigidity of ballet’s formal positions. Cunningham’s own innovations and

negations carried him far beyond a mere synthesis of the two schools. He jettisoned, first, all vestiges of storytelling and psychology—the aspect of Graham’s choreography that bothered him the most (the aspect that Balanchine himself threw out of his contemporary ballets). A Cunningham dance has nothing to “say”; it presents dancers, individuals, moving on a stage in patterns that do not transpose them into anything less, or more, than human beings whose means of expression are the body. What was far more disturbing, Cunningham also jettisoned the dance's reliance on music. From the start of their association in 1944, Cunningham and John Cage, the company’s musical director, have proceeded on the assumption that the dance and its score should be separate events taking place within the same moment of time. Often, the dancers do not even hear the score of a new work until they perform it in public. “The result is that the dance is free to act as it chooses, as is the music,” Cunningham wrote. “The music doesn’t have to work itself to death trying to underline the dance, or the dance create havoc in trying to be as flashy as the music.” To the end of more freedom of individual expression. The most misunderstood of all Cunningham's innovations is his use of chance methods. Since 1951, Cunningham has occasionally tossed coins to determine the sequence, duration, and spatial direction of various movements within a dance-movenemnts that he has determined in advance —or to decide the order of a dance’s several parts. In his 1963 Field Dances, Cunningham went further: he devised for each dancer a series of relatively simple movements that he could perform as he chose and in his own time, leaving and entering the stage on his own initiative. Just as the use of chance methods in composition was a “mode of freeing the imagination from its own clichés,” the “indeterminate,” element performance was designed to give the dancers freedom and to unlock their imaginations. “It’s a kind of anarchy,” Cunningham once said, “where people may work freely together.” This kind of anarchy has been carried further still by the new dance avant-garde, most of whose members are former Cunningham students or performers, and all of whom take as their starting point the Cunningham idea that any movement—walking, sitting down, picking up a match—can become part of a dance. Interestingly, Cunningham himself has tended lately to pull back from the exercise of too much freedom

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