'Way Station' reviews 'Loose Time' reviews 'Fall and Run' reviews John Cage's Lecture on Indeterminacy recent Cunningham reviews more Brendan McCarthy reviews

The first work, 'Way Station', was premiered a year ago in New York. A ‘way station’ might be an oasis or a breathing space. If Cunningham was being literal about this, always a risky assumption, the ‘way stations’ here might have been the five papier-mâché tripod sculptures in bright fluorescent colours, designed by Charles Long. The tripods, which were jellyfish-like, dwarfed the dancers, while also offering canopies for short repose. Such pauses as there were, were short-lived, with fickle sweeps of movement that delighted and frequently overwhelmed the eye. Unlike either of last week’s pieces, the choreography was relational, contrapuntal, even if this was occasionally ‘offset’. It shone with intelligence. Takehisa Kosugi’s score was contemporaneous with the choreography. While it was wilfully unrelated, it was not obstructive. Most choreographers comment on their chosen music, seeking headroom for an additional gloss or annotation of their own. This is not Cunningham’s way. His dances are not a gloss and he is not prepared to dwell in whatever space may be left to him by a composer. With a mostly non-intrusive score, it was possible, as with neither of the works in the first programme, to absorb the choreography in its unsupported and pure autonomy.

Merce Cunningham's Loose Time
Photograph by Asya Verzhbinsky ©

For 'Loose Time', the night’s pièce de résistance (premiered eight months ago at the University of Berkeley, California), the curtain rose on a cast dressed in grey-black gauze tights and on a stage backdrop of black netted gauze. The visuals were very primary and industrial, redolent perhaps of a coalmine. The title, [i]“Loose Time”[/i], is an interesting one for Cunningham, in the light of his dissociation of music and choreography: it came from the choreographer’s wish “to cut the time up in a way which was quicker.” Whatever Cunningham meant, the result is clear enough: the piece pulsed with life, contemporary, passionate and engaged – even fiery, absolutely not an old man’s ballet. At other performances, a highlight has been Holly Farmer’s solo: on Saturday night this was heavily abbreviated

The closing work, 'How to Jump, Kick, Fall and Run', was a revival from 1965, its title derived from a book on football. Cunningham and David Vaughan, the company’s archivist, who sat at the front of the stage, were oddly reminiscent of Statler and Waldorf, the two cantankerous Muppets, who heckle the stage performers from a theatre box. They read short passages from John Cage’s Lecture on Indeterminacy as members of the company danced sequences of light-hearted sports or games in the background. The stories were laconic – and, as with much else in Cunningham, were chosen by chance. Cunningham had originally planned that the order of the dances would be similarly determined by chance, but in rehearsal found this to be over-complicated. The cumulative effect was hilarious as the frenetic intensities of the choreography and the Wobegonesque ramblings downstage vied with each other in irrelevance.

Cunningham has been criticised for his reliance on chance. In his favour, it might be argued that rolling the dice offers a decisive break with preconception. Cunningham’s signature is uniquely his own and which most other choreographers would not care to imitate. However he is one of dance’s outstanding creators and, on this week’s evidence, he is still at the height of his powers.