Stuff You Gotta Watch: Cunningham
“I never was interested in dancing that referred to a mood or indeed that expressed the music [… ] The dancing does not refer. It is what it is.”
Born in 1919, Merce Cunningham founded his dance company in New York in 1953 and became one of the most influential choreographers of the century, continuing to work until his death in 2009. Cunningham, a restrained documentary originally released in 3D, is a fine attempt at bringing his radical philosophy of dance to the screen. The doc arranges archival footage and interview excerpts around newly filmed flashes of Cunningham’s most groundbreaking pieces. His bodies move with animal force and balletic grace, seemingly ignorant of the concept of a stage; they leap and ricochet and topple into each other, on rooftops and in forests, in empty plazas and grand buildings.
Per Cunningham’s insistence on abstraction, the music often seems to be doing its own thing. We see John Cage extracting soft thuds from his prepared piano, and get a glimpse of their creative and romantic relationship, including wonderful shots of the composer on tour with Cunningham’s company, hopping out of the VW minibus to forage for mushrooms. As for the other excerpts, there’s not more than a music credit to the works of David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Conlon Nancarrow. These are men of abstraction; interested in texture, duration, and asymmetry, and in the frontiers of electronic music. Their music, too, does not refer.
Chance sometimes played a role in their compositions, as it did for Cunningham. Applied to the dynamics of a dance performance, these vectors of abstraction made it seem like “nobody is responsible,” but also “not irresponsible,” as Cage remembers. “That creates a wonderful feeling about the possibilities of society.”
Review by Chal Ravens. Check out the full archive of the Stuff You Gotta Watch column.