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Merce Cunningham Dance CompanySeptember 2002 London, Barbican by Brendan McCarthy |
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In the programme notes to his company’s performances at the Barbican this week, Merce Cunningham is quoted as follows: “Clarity is the lowest form of poetry, and language, like all else in our lives, is always changing.” The remark is scarcely surprising, coming as it does from a close associate of John Ashbery, perhaps the most densely obscure poet of the 20th century. It is a key to Cunningham’s own credo. He is stubborn in his determination not to clarify and in his refusal to make connections, except in the sense of coincidence in time. The first Cunningham programme at the Barbican consisted of two works: Fluid Canvas, a world premiere dedicated to Dance Umbrella’s founder, Val Bourne and Interscape , first given in New York two years ago. Fluid Canvas’s backdrop is a digital artwork, whose patterns derive from Cunningham’s wrist movements and the tracked movements of several animals. While these animations seem initially in their turn to animate the choreography, any apparent connection is rapidly sundered. The writing is vintage Cunningham – with its vanishing fleetness, its irresistible poetics, and its very New World staccato restlessness. It is not a completely satisfying piece. Cunningham’s faith in chance can lead to skewed geometries with over-full and ragged ensembles. The score by John King and Takehisa Kosigi compels attention neither in its own right, nor for its complementary value. The graphics sequence, while conceptually imaginative, was underpowered and quite possibly under-funded. Cunningham has made a life’s work of disdaining the credo voiced by EM Forster, ‘Only Connect’. Given his crucial role in the making of the graphic, and his well- flagged fascination with the use of computer graphics in the making of new dances, it would have been satisfying to watch Cunningham draw the linking thread just once. As with Fluid Canvas, Interscape has captivating moments. It begins as a studio exercise dimly glimpsed through a gauze curtain with a collage by Robert Rauschenberg. The word 'interscape' is interestingly redolent of Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'inscape': the inward quality of objects and events, perceived by observation and introspection of the poet, who embodies them in unique poetic forms. Perhaps 'Inscape' might have been the better title. 'Interscape' has nuances of connection, and, predictably, Cunningham recoils from any such intention. It is almost as if he has a horror of connection: his duets are formal rather than relational, his interest being in shapes and in purity of movement - but determinedly neither in stories nor in rumours of them.
The performance makes heavy demands on one’s attention span. I found it watchable, but not with any continuity and never for very long. There is no easy organising principle. Cunningham is a consummate artist driven by his passion for what he calls ‘the slippery nature of movement itself’. He resists frames, is not - at root - a man of the theatre and probably does not care to be. His legacy is to choreographers ‘without the walls’ and, especially, to those whose preferred medium is film, rather than to those who prefer a stage framed by a proscenium arch.
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