Soloism
“You are the music/ While the music lasts.” Whatever these words mean in Eliot’s Four Quartets, they have often been given new meaning in dance, and nowhere more so than in the solos choreographed by Merce Cunningham. He is the choreographer whose most radical, controversial, and profound contribution to choreography was to separate it from music — or so it seemed. The dance that the audience saw and the music that it heard were composed independently. The audible music, which often varied unpredictably at each performance, operated separately, sometimes like a hostile environment. What was easy to miss was that, whereas most dance responded to heard music, Cunningham’s dance embodied many unheard musics. It was a theatrical adventure without serious precedent: sometimes the dancers seemed to be at one with “the music of the spheres.”
The neurologist Oliver Sacks often wrote, most hauntingly in Awakenings, of the effect of music on physical coordination. He turned this effect into a participle: some recovering patients feel that they are “musicked,” others feel “unmusicked.” The profound connection that he describes of music to movement is something that all lovers of dance surely recognize. But Sacks tends to write of music as something that enters the human from an exterior source, from outside, as a stimulating accompaniment. Cunningham took the process to another level: he and his dancers made music by dancing it. The originality of the approach can hardly be exaggerated.
Cunningham died in 2009. Are the musics within his choreography surviving his death? April 16, 2019 would have been Cunningham’s hundredth birthday. Since he died not too long ago and presented his last big premiere on his ninetieth birthday, memories were fresh. The centennial evening was marked by “A Night of a Hundred Solos,” staged in three cities: London, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles, a hundred in each city, a different anthology in each case. If you knew Cunningham’s choreography, it was natural to regard all three events as retrospectives, spanning the fifty-six years of his extraordinary career, 1953 to 2009. I was among many who watched one performance live, the other two on screen.Yet much about the evenings was anti-retrospective. The dancers could have included alumni of Cunningham’s own company (several of whom are still in good shape), but they were excluded. Instead, the performers were chosen from a far wider range of ages, physiques, and technical skills than Cunningham himself had used. As a result, the performance opened up Cunningham’s work in new directions to dancers who had never performed his work in public before. As always after a choreographer’s death — and sometimes during her or his lifetime — there were moments when his spirit seemed entirely absent, and others when it was alive but in peculiar ways. Often enough his solos were marvelously present, with an astonishingly diverse assortment of dancers, newly musicked, offering a wide range of physical and expressive idioms.In a career devoted to experiment, Cunningham opened many doors to the future. (“New possibilities” was a favorite catchphrase of his.) What was uncanny about “Night of a Hundred Solos” is that, by creating a dance theater composed of solos alone, it anticipated the realm of social isolation that would become the new norm within less than a year. Even when the stage contained several different solos at the same time, each of the dancers was isolated, focused, motivated — and sometimes conflicted, sometimes experimenting. For Cunningham, a solo had always been a process of self-discovery — and here was the process continuing after his death. The London, New York, and Los Angeles editions, each ninety minutes long, were quite different anthologies of Cunningham material, but each amounted to more than a collection of solos: all three were celebrations of the possibilities of soloism. A year later Cunningham solos were being taught on Instagram, where “mercetrust” now has over 39,000 followers. And each solo is a musical composition in physical form.
Cunningham was a skilled and powerful partner, trained in ballroom genres from his early teens; and he was happy amid company. But he was also, by temperament, one of nature’s soloists: freest when performing alone. In his case, isolation really was splendid.
He began studying modern dance at the age of eighteen in Seattle, with Bonnie Bird, who had studied with Martha Graham. Graham, notably in her masterpiece Primitive Mysteries in 1930, had been studying the dances of the Native Americans of the Southwest. This was an era when American anthropology was seizing the imaginations of many: it helped Americans to identify the traditions peculiar to their continent. Cunningham, in his second year of studying modern dance, discovered anthropology, which remained a lifelong source of interest — in particular the dances and culture of one particular tribe of Native Americans, the Swinomish, a tribe that lives and fishes on the islands and coasts in northern Puget Sound, in northwest Washington state. Whereas the dances of the Southwest tribes emphasized the collective, many of the dances of the Northwest are trance dances for soloists. As Bonnie Bird put it: “The Northwest Indian dance is spirit dancing, quite different from the group dancing of the Southwest — it’s always solo dancing, one dances only when one has ‘caught one’s song’ and is filled with the spirit that takes over, that invades one.”
In 1939, Cunningham moved to New York, dancing with Graham’s company until 1946. He began presenting his own choreography in 1942. From the 1950s on, his own work became renowned and notorious for what remains the most radical move in modern choreography: making dance and music co-exist independently of each other. The word “song,” used by Bird to describe the Northwest Native American dances, is often used by Cunningham dancers, though few of us were aware of this while Cunningham was alive. Once you know, however, it seems obvious. Patricia Lent, who danced for Cunningham from 1982 to 1993 and was named by him as one of his Trustees, has observed that
Merce (and all of us) “sang” the rhythm of phrases. It’s related to, but not the same as counting a phrase — a little more open, using words/sounds for the movements mixed in with counts & claps & snaps, in a way that indicates rhythm, dynamics and timing, etc. If a phrase has multiple meters or is non-metric, it can still be “sung.”
The dancer Jeannie Steele was a member of the company between 1993 and 2005. Those dates mean that she belonged to what is known as Cunningham’s computer period, when he was generating choreographic ideas on screen before he taught them to the dancers. This often seemed to change the nature of Cunningham’s phrasing and all-over physicality — and yet Steele, speaking in 2019, recalled that “My head was full of songs and sonatas when we danced!” She added: “We didn’t hear those songs and sonatas; yet we saw them, even felt them.” When I asked Steele whether the music in her head was ever remotely like John Cage or other Cunningham composers, she said, “No — it was not minimalist.” And she made a further point. When making a solo, Cunningham would sometimes say, “Rhythm is one thing, but phrasing is another. For phrasing, you have to listen to Billie Holiday.” He loved Holiday for her way of bending a rhythm within a phrase. Although Cunningham did not speak of Billie Holiday to most other dancers, he did encourage various forms of rhythmic play and (in some dancers, not all) rubato, the old musical technique of taking freedoms with tempo in performance, of delaying and accelerating for purposes of interpretation. BIPED, from 1999, the most generally acknowledged masterpiece of his final years, begins with a suite of five solos. The first was made on Glen Rumsey, whom Cunningham instructed: “This solo must always be one minute long — but you must take different parts faster and slower at each performance.”In 1940, when the young Cunningham was sent by Graham to study at the School of American Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein, the philosopher-historian of ballet and the school’s director, did not look kindly on the prospect. “Why would a modern dancer want to study ballet?” Cunningham’s reply was frank, simple, and accurate: “I really like all kinds of movement.” Indeed he did. Before he had taken up modern dance at the age of eighteen, before he had observed the Swinomish dances at the age of nineteen, he had trained extensively in tap and ballroom; and many of his subsequent dancers felt that tap was near the roots of his creativity. The radical Cunningham was not always averse to the traditional interaction of music and dance. From the 1970s on, many who took his technique classes remember the glee he took in the pianism of Pat Richter, whose repertory ranged from Scarlatti to Rodgers and Hammerstein.
A part of the technical training that he gave to his dancers was to increase their speed and thereby the finesse with which they could play with rhythm. But if there was no pianist, he himself gave his dancers their music. The Cunningham dancer Alan Good, who danced for Cunningham from 1978 to 1994, said recently:
It’s not true that we took class from Merce without music — Now that he’s gone, I crave a recording of it! Merce had that amazing way of snapping his fingers, calling, hitting radiators, tapping his foot, slapping his leg — incredible rhythms. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s music.
This was Cunningham the jazz musician. Those Cunningham dancers with prior tap training often discerned a tap sensibility in the way he would teach them the rhythms and phrasing of a new dance. For Cunningham, rhythm was already an opening to music. Sometimes the rhythms were of exceptional complexity. To an outsider, Cunningham’s Native Green, from 1985, seems like one of his less physically rigorous pieces, with a marvelously rippling lyricism, and an emphasis — unusual for him — on connective flow throughout the limbs and body. (“This “ripple” effect may have been Cunningham’s adaptation of the “release technique” developed by a number of choreographers who had worked with him in the past.) But it opened with a solo that Cunningham gave to Megan Walker, who has recounted how she was dealing with sequences all in different odd numbers: 9, 7, 5, 11, 13, 15, 17, then 13, 7, 5, 15, 17, 11, 9, then 11, 13, 9, 15.
My experience dancing the solo was that the odd inorganic measure of count was done to break up the possibility of the movement becoming too “flowy” and predictable. The movement was very sequential within each body part but also between body parts. So the back might ripple — lower, middle, upper — but also have a sequential relationship to the entire body: torso, leg, arm, head, for example. Or head, body, arm, leg, or some other variation of body parts following one another. It was sensual but awkward and weird.
There are many musicalities, inside dance and beyond it. For some dancers, movement must be absorbed as meter: they need to count. For others, it is a more jazz-like kind of rhythm: hence the tap response. And for others, movement is melody: they have to sing it. Cunningham allowed, and educated, his dancers to work in all these ways. A Cunningham solo need not stay rooted in one rhythm alone, while almost every larger Cunningham dance deploys a wide range of rhythms. There are works of polyphonic music in which three or more voices are heard, with different speeds but part of one encompassing rhythm. Cunningham, however, developed something more: an alternative polyphony in which multiple dancers go about their business onstage, each in a different meter. The music in a Cunningham piece is never part of the music we hear, except the sounds of the footwork.
While the Cunningham dancer explores time, he or she explores space, too. The connection of time and space is as elemental to dance as it is to physics, but for the musician-composer John Cage it was especially so. Cunningham first encountered Cage in 1938-1939 in Seattle, when Cage, who was twenty-six, joined the faculty of the Cornish School where Cunningham was studying. In some classes Cage taught the dancers to consider dividing both space and time as they made dances, and to compose percussion music as they danced. Cage, a man of Diaghilevian enthusiasm for the latest modernism in music and art (his wife Xenia was a surrealist sculptor), encouraged Cunningham and other students to study new art. When Cunningham arrived in New York in 1939, he continued the process, befriending many artists. And when the Cages arrived in New York in 1942, initially staying with Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst, they intensified Cunningham’s absorption in new painting.
When Cunningham began to present dance recitals — usually with Cage as the lone musician — there was always a large number of artists in the audience; virtually a clique. According to one anecdote told in a book about Willem de Kooning, in 1946 the art critic Harold Rosenberg stood up before curtain time at a Cunningham performance at Hunter College and in a booming voice announced, “There’s a stranger in the third row — throw him out!” Then, as the lights began to dim, he jumped up again. Looking around and not seeing the sculptor Ibram Lassaw and his wife in the audience, he protested, “The evening can’t start — the Lassaws aren’t here yet!” Elaine de Kooning told the same story, but about a Cunningham concert in 1954. Cunningham’s early dance recitals — avant-garde by the standards of both ballet and modern dance — appealed to the clubbish world of New York painters long before those painters attained fame and even longer before Cunningham’s work grabbed other dancegoers.I am reminded of those artist-dominated audiences whenever I see Cunningham’s Suite for Five, from 1956. (It incorporates some male solos from a 1953 work, and in 1958 Cunningham added a female solo to it.) This, as pure a dance as Cunningham ever made, is dramatic not because of any acting but because it abounds with formal and physical contrasts. There is nothing that resembles a plot: we seem to be watching an artist at work in the studio, trying out ideas. When we first see the lead man (originally Cunningham himself) he is standing still in one downstage corner but is facing along a further downstage diagonal. To open his first solo, he simply turns his upper body, from the waist, to face the side. Returning to his original stance, he slowly rises onto the balls of his feet (relevé in ballet) in a way that looks precarious, hovering on half-toe for the sake of its sheer vertical emphasis. His next sequence of steps takes him backwards along that diagonal. Sideways; upwards; backwards — the work has begun by addressing fundamental facts of space: you hardly notice that they are etched in long, firm phrases.In the same work, when the leading woman dances a solo, she is both artwork and artist. She has an early phrase in which she, balancing on one leg with her other leg extended behind her in a sculptural position, rotates from the ankle from side to side, so that her leg, torso, and arms maintain their fixed position while swaying as if in the breeze. The image always evokes one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. (Calder had been an inspiration for New York artists since the 1920s and 1930s.) Moving forward towards us, she then turns and tilts her upper body to the side, and then extends her arms forwards as if making a long hoop, one arm above the other. With her legs facing in one direction and her arms in another, she is multidirectional. And then she parts those arms wide, as if opening a vertical zone of air. It’s as if she is sculpting space.
In those solos and others, leading Cunningham dancers, although performing set choreography, seem like creative “action” artists, as vivid in their cool way as film of the more violent Jackson Pollock throwing paint on a canvas. It might seem surprising to describe Cunningham as an Abstract Expressionist: one intelligent account of his work, Roger Copeland’s Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance, argues that Cunningham and Cage went with their friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in rejecting the “action art” of the earlier generation of New York artists. But the issue is more complex than any either/or. Willem de Kooning, the only Abstract Expressionist to share Pollock’s degree of eminence, spoke to Cunningham of his admiration, and Cunningham valued his praise. There was a personal antipathy between the extremely heterosexual Pollock and Cage, whose private homosexuality Pollock seems to have spotted, but that did not stop Cunningham from recognizing Pollock’s importance. In an interview in 1970, Cunningham chose Pollock as the exemplification of the modern impulse in theatre:
I think it is essential now to see all the elements of theater as both separate and interdependent. The idea of a single focus to which all adhere is no longer relevant. With the paintings of Jackson Pollock the eye can go to any place on the canvas. No one point is more important than another. No point necessarily leads to another.
By the 1950s, Cunningham was a master of peripheral space and unorthodox stage geometries. Rune, from 1959, begins with the male dancer alone not only in an upstage corner but facing into it: in one of the most peculiar beginnings of any dance, he stands still there for a whole half-minute before moving. One basic law of Cunningham physics is, Wherever the dancer is facing, that is front. Cunningham often took conventional geometries and made surprising use of them. Perhaps no path across the stage is more orthodox than the diagonal, especially when crossing from an upstage corner to the downstage corner opposite. It was a favorite of the late nineteenth-century choreographer Marius Petipa, and it was also recommended by the old-school modern-dance guru Doris Humphrey in The Art of Making Dances. Cunningham uses it often — for example in a renowned solo made for Holley Farmer in Loose Time in 2002. But see what he does with it! For a start, the diagonal is the entire solo, which takes the better part of two minutes. (On the Hundred Solos night, the ballerina Sara Mearns danced it, barefoot, as she has on a number of subsequent occasions in several countries.) The soloist punctuates it with a furious series of steps (many of them jumps), attacked with maximum intensity, in which arms, legs, and spine keep changing position, all phrased in groups of threes. You hardly notice that her trajectory is a diagonal, because she keeps changing direction with each step. She is hurling thunderbolts, but she never fully releases their energy. Even though her energy is explosive, we are aware that her furnaces stay charged.Cunningham’s Neighbors, from 1991, starts with a lone man leaping along the opposite diagonal — from upstage left to downstage right — in three jumps of exciting impetus. But whereas a Petipa dancer might use such a line of jumps along that same diagonal to convey a single progress, as stations of a single journey, Cunningham changes the emphasis on each jump. The dancer takes the first jump facing in the direction of the jump. On the second, however, his torso pivots so that, though his legs have taken him in the same direction, he lands facing sideways. And on the third, his torso pivots yet further, so that he lands facing back up that same diagonal, looking in the direction from which he came. You watch the art disassembled into its basic elements, which are then re-combined in wholly unexpected and unprecedented ways.
For many Cunningham dancers and observers, it is important not to attach meanings to steps, and generally they are right. Still, you cannot fully experience Cunningham’s work as drama unless you find some passages that lodge ideas in your head. Neighbors has not been danced since the early 1990s, but I have never forgotten that opening diagonal. (The dancer was Alan Good, marvelously in-the-moment.) Although I resisted the temptation to interpret it, the haunting effect of that sequence — with arrivals successively facing ahead, sideways, and backwards — began to suggest someone who addressed future, present, and past. Meanings began to insinuate themselves. After Cunningham’s death, his choreographic notes were opened to researchers at the New York Public Library and lo and behold, Cunningham prepared Neighbors with the working title of Hierartic Shaman. (The strange spelling “Hierartic” is consistently used over some weeks of notes.) The dancer who opened it with those jumps had begun life in Cunningham’s highly formal mind as a shaman, another of his anthropological reimaginations.Since Cunningham took the purity of pure dance into new zones, his dances have too seldom been considered as drama. Most Cunningham dances call for no dimension of acting. The pared-down lack of make-believe or role-playing was an important ingredient for many of his performers. And yet we would be wrong not to regard them as theater. John Cage liked to say that any street corner was theater anyway. A few Cunningham dances do have evident elements of dance acting — Crises (1960), RainForest (1968) — but they are so far from most forms of theater that people shy away from discussing their expressive aspects. I can only plead that to try to do so is to deepen the Cunningham experience. Let us consider only the beginning of Crises and the ending of RainForest.In Crises, a work revived this century, the curtain rises to reveal a dancer (originally the exceptional Viola Farber, whose performance was caught on film) in pure-dance conflict. She is unforgettably divided against herself. Two concurrent impulses are visible in her body at the same time: she slowly extends one leg to the side (développé à la seconde, to use ballet terminology), but above the waist her torso is convulsed by spasms. She could be a character out of Dostoyevsky (a writer whom Cunningham admired); she could be a case of Multiple Personality Syndrome. The lead male dancer (originally Cunningham himself) is gradually approaching her, but she is so locked in her own state, so possessed, that what she is doing seems like a solo. A duet does eventually ensue, but with this astounding opening image Cunningham has established how powerfully independent a woman can be. Crises is a dance for four women and one man, and all four women might take “I’ll be hard to handle” for their motto.
Until its ending, RainForest is one of Cunningham’s many studies in change. We watch the first dancers leave the stage while others take their place. Everyone who enters is new to us, and is distinctly individual. There is no interest in any unison of identity. There are six in the cast: the fourth, fifth, and sixth dancers we see might each be from a different animal species. The title refers to two very different rainforests: that of the Congo described in the anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s book The Forest People and the one in the Pacific Northwest’s Olympian Peninsula, the magical realm to which the young Cunningham was introduced by his parents in his childhood. Nothing about Cunningham’s drama is a literal rendition of either locale: his imagination is powerful, but it is not narratively specific, so it also liberates ours. But then he adds two final twists to his wordless scenario. The sixth character is onstage when the original man strides back on. We were not expecting someone we knew. Has this succession of changing characters suddenly become La Ronde? Yet he is transformed: he is far more authoritative than before. Since RainForest has been a succession of highly charged encounters, we do not fully appreciate the change in him at first.
Finally he is left onstage alone. The solo that ends RainForest is like nothing else we have seen here. He is on fire, furiously charging round the stage, swinging one arm like a propeller, full of abrupt changes of direction and focus. This is the role that Cunningham made for himself, and this is the solo in which he declares himself as seer and poet. Whereas he was once part of the RainForest world, now he has taken possession of it. The stage in RainForest famously abounds in the helium-filled silver balloons designed by Andy Warhol — but it is only now that a character commands this unpredictable vegetation with gestures that claim the air. If there is a line in poetry that comes to mind — it does invariably for me — it is Rimbaud’s “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage,” “Only I have the key to this wild parade.” (For John Ashbery, introducing his translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Cunningham was one of Rimbaud’s heirs in his visions of the modern.)
Cunningham’s dance theatre abounds with solos, but it is not anti-social. Some of his ensembles, even those with solos occurring in them, are like parties. How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1968) combines vigorous athletic impetus with champagne celebration; Duets (1980) is a series of six couples each exhibiting a different idiom — “ballroomy,” said Cunningham, though no ballroom ever contained pairs like these; and Roaratorio (1983) is a (largely festive) wake. In a number of Cunningham dances, the entire ensemble — often more than twelve dancers — all takes to the stage doing individual solos at the same time. A fine example is the end of CRWDSPCR, made for thirteen dancers in 1992. The work’s name is pronounced “crowd-spacer” or “crowds-pacer”: it is an intensely urban piece, with an ebullient finale that is the biggest moment of release throughout the whole work, yet with nobody connecting. Such scenes — “ensembles” is certainly the wrong word — are celebrations of contingency in human encounters, of diversity in social coexistence.Often the image of coexistence seems to become a peaceful, nothing-happening, everything-happening landscape populated by multiple species but undisturbed by man. These works — though several Cunningham alumni do not accept the term — are widely known as Cunningham’s “nature studies.” (Inlets, Inlets 2, Beachbirds, and Pond Way are prime examples.) In reality, they are studies in Zen. Some of the most striking soloist roles are for women. In Pond Way, from 1998, one woman slowly but unstoppably passes across the stage: she does not seem to notice that three men are dancing around her, waiving attendance on her, supporting her — as they claim her, she behaves with complete indifference, as if she has no need of them. Another woman dances a stationary solo that reminds me and others of a water lily. She steps into a balance, slowly allows an impulse to pass up her body like a wave, until her upper body and arms open into bloom; then she steps into the next balance, gradually opens upward again into bloom; and thence onward, flowering and re-flowering.
BIPED, the sensational hit of Cunningham’s old age, had its premiere the year after Pond Way, and two weeks after his eightieth birthday. It begins with a suite of five brilliantly energized solos. Each swept to and fro across the stage; each drew a different irregular chart in a different rhythm. Whether you saw these dancers as humans or spirits — for many people BIPED is about transcendence or death — their range of vocabulary said much about Cunningham’s view of energy itself. He himself was increasingly confined to a wheelchair by then, but not so his idea of dance. Ten years later he celebrated his ninetieth birthday with Nearly Ninety, which abounded with trios, duets, and, yes, solos. One section was a series of no fewer than eight successive solos for different dancers. Every solo announced the dancer brilliantly, with marvelously differentiated uses of the head and eyes. Brandon Collwes, facing front as he began, slowly turned his eyes to his left while his left foot stealthily crossed over to the right, as if the action of his eyes might distract you from noticing that that foot was moving in the opposite direction. And every solo had a “but,” a striking change of topic. Rashaun Mitchell began with his feet planted far apart, slowly swinging his pelvis from side to side like a pendulum, but he ended with a stunning circuit of jumps around the stage, and each jump, hovering at its apex, struck a different shape.When is a solo a solo? Often in Cunningham it is hard to know whether a quintet is a quintet or five simultaneous solos, or whether a duet is a duet or two adjacent solos. And it is deliberately hard. Cunningham loved ambiguity and hated categorization. August Pace, in 1989, was an ensemble for fifteen dancers, but its duration was structured as a sequence of seven male-female duets. Intermittently there were marvelous supplementary passages that added extra layers of structural mystery around each duet: the fifteenth dancer, never seen in a duet but often partnered by several men at a time, was like the joker in the deck. Within each duet, when each couple met for partnering, they did so dramatically, with different kinds of support. In the final duet, the woman took exciting falls into the man’s arms.
In most of each duet, however, woman and man stayed notably apart from each other, in separate but simultaneous solos, in separate meters and thus in separate spheres. It is no surprise to discover in Cunningham’s notes that the August Pace duets were largely planned as pairs of independent but simultaneous solos. In most choreography, the term pas de deux, literally “steps for two,” is a misnomer, with the man doing little but supporting the woman — but in Cunningham we often see separate pas given to tous les deux. The surprise is that several of his other duets involve sustained proximity between their two dancers.
His penultimate work, XOVER, from 2007, consists almost entirely of couples. But while the opening and closing sections were ensembles, made up of pairs, the long central section was one long, slow duet. It lasted seven minutes and thirty seconds, and it tested the duet form to a new kind of extreme. Maintaining one tempo, the couple moved in the same tempo in a zig-zag path across the stage, and they never left one another’s side. But they were often at right-angles to each other, connecting a series of statuesque positions in a steady legato sequence; and their eyes seemed never to meet. Their degree of contact and support seemed largely formal, though they showed signs of mutual awareness, even mutual curiosity. This was, it seemed, a picture of a couple politely cohabiting while maintaining separate lives of the mind: both beautiful and poignant. Beckett once remarked that Waiting for Godot was about symbiosis; the same can be said about the XOVER duet.
To borrow a Sondheim line, many Cunningham duets seem to ask, “Are we a pair?” His solos, however, contradict another line from Sondheim: “Alone is alone, not alive.” In Cunningham, alone is alive. No soloist in Cunningham seems lonely, and many are freer when apart from others. And in an era of epidemiologically enforced isolation, Cunningham’s art of soloism seems more profoundly connected to human experience than ever before.
Cunningham died in July, 2009. He amazed many (though not all) in announcing in June of that year that he wanted his dance company to deliver a two-year posthumous tour and then close operations forever. Sure enough, the Cunningham company then toured the world intensely in 2010-2011, giving more performances in 2011 than in any year since 1987. Thus December 2011 became the Cunningham Dance Company’s final month of performances. Three of them were at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. One of the works performed there was Split Sides, which originally had its premiere in that theater in 2003. An elaborate affair, it involved two musical scores (by the British rock band Radiohead and the Icelandic experimental group Sigur Ros), two décors, and two lighting plans. People in the audience, often celebrities, were invited onstage before each performance to shake dice, which determined the order of the scores, lighting, sets, costumes. You never knew in advance how Split Sides would look or sound.The binary nature of Split Sides continued into one highly complex solo for the young Jonah Bokaer, who had to ride two different rhythms, both intricate, at the same time, often while hopping or balancing on one leg. After Bokaer left the company, Cunningham gave this solo to his newest soloist, the prodigiously talented Silas Riener. He had over three years of experience in it when he danced it in Brooklyn that December. He made an immediate sensation, with applause bursting out as he left the stage after his dance. Cunningham had been fascinated by the possibilities of balance since at least the 1950s: by one or more dancers balancing on one leg, adjusting balance while on one leg, hopping and/or tilting on one leg while maintaining an otherwise fixed position. Riener’s Split Sides solo, even more audacious and complex than Bokaer’s had been, has become Cunningham’s last and posthumous demonstration of the miracle of balance. (The Brooklyn Academy captured his performance on a video, which was quickly released and soon went viral on YouTube, where it remains an amazement to this day; type “Silas Riener Cunningham Split Sides.” Indeed, the Cunningham adventure continues on Instagram and Facebook among other media, much consulted when the world’s dancers were at their most isolated from one another during the Covid years; and a Doubles Suite arranged by Cunningham in 2008 may be seen in both Tacita Dean’s sensuous film of the Cunningham company’s Craneway Event that year and in the DVD of the Cunningham Company’s closing performances at the New York Park Avenue Armory at the end of December 2011.)
Cunningham made Split Sides during his “computer period,” when he devised dances on a dance-adapted computer before teaching them to the dancers. (The dancers never saw the computer, just as they seldom if ever saw him using chance procedures, though his notes reveal that, just as he had said, he used dice or coins to determine many aspects of each work from the 1950s onward, often a different compositional aspect with each work.) He used the computer to delineate feats of physical coordination that had never been attempted before. It was sometimes possible to feel that this made the dancers look like robots — but what do any of us know of robots? Riener in Split Sides was many things: an alien from another planet, intensely human, wholly unpredictable, kinesthetically affecting. There are many moments in dance when, as we sit still watching, we nonetheless feel some part of us is dancing or being danced. This solo abounded in them, so that Riener’s initial staccato outbursts at first seemed inhuman, robotic — and then, such was his sustained control of physical energy, we were swept along by his impetus even while being amazed by it. I saw Riener perform it in Cunningham’s lifetime in 2008, and twice at the Brooklyn Academy in 2011, but there are still moments that astound me to watch on video. He chews up space as he travels backwards across the stage on one leg, and then, with the other leg stretched arrow-like behind him, he suddenly tips his torso over to the side: an invariably breath-taking feat. Watching, we feel that we are losing our balance with him — and then we realize that we are not. Like the amazing figure on stage, we are still in control.
Cunningham himself had been a great dancer, often performing lead roles with jumps into his fifties, always onstage in at least one work given by his company every evening until he was seventy, sometimes returning to perform onstage into his eighties. At every stage of his career, however, there were important works in which he showed his faith in what his dancers could do without him. One such, in 1985, was named Doubles. One of the name’s implications was that Cunningham planned it with two casts, but gave each cast its own striking differences of inflection from the very first rehearsal. There were three male solos, one female solo (which opened the work), and a slow, recurring female duet — no touching — in the peripheries of the stage (which, Cunningham’s notes reveal, was originally planned as another solo). Each solo lasted several minutes in its own sustained meter; some of them seemed to have the physical spacing of chess pieces.
The dancing was so powerful, each dancer was so individual, that you could reasonably see these solos as the heart of Doubles. Yet the Doubles world was larger than these thrilling individuals. As in August Pace, Cunningham created other ensemble dance material that conjured a fluid climate and context, like an urban park or piazza. These ebullient solos poured forth with force, pulse, and wonderfully heart-catching details (sudden changes of direction or focus, jumps whose apex caught the light, gestures of arms or legs that claimed the moment) while other people — including those soloists — came and went in various speeds and idioms, with the sublimity of a city square. What a piece of work is man! And how beautiful the democracies within which he or she can be free.