Monat: April 2009
Merce Cunningham
This Probably Isn’t Possible, But …
NEARLY NINETY, a new work by the choreographer Merce Cunningham, will have its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday. The title makes sense: Mr. Cunningham turns 90 that day, and the choreography runs nearly 90 minutes.
There are other Cunningham anniversaries this year. Ten years ago this July, on the stage of the New York State Theater, he was awarded the citys highest cultural award, the Handel Medallion. To that audience he recalled, as he has on other occasions, how he arrived in New York for the first time in September 1939, by train, ready to join Martha Grahams company as its second male dancer: “I stepped onto the sidewalk, took one look at the skyline and thought, ˜This is home.
Earlier in 1999, two weeks after his 80th birthday, he presented the premiere of a magnum opus, Biped, in Berkeley, Calif. It seemed if any Merce Cunningham piece may be said to have any subject beyond itself — to be full of images of transcendence, of life beyond death. Its many exits and entrances, astonishingly lighted by Aaron Copp, were magical.
Above all, and most surprising from a man of 80, Biped looked fecund, abundant, a cornucopia of poetic invention. That Berkeley audience greeted it with a mighty ovation (as audiences the world over have ever since). At a reception afterward Mr. Cunningham recalled how he had recently visited his brother in his hometown, Centralia, Wash. After they had talked of various old acquaintances, his brother asked, Merce, when are you going to make something the public likes?
Mr. Cunningham told this blithely, without further comment. He was for many years a phenomenal dancer and has committed his whole career to virtuoso technical accomplishment. I sometimes think he was Americas Nijinsky, without the madness. Like Nijinsky he had an astounding jump, an extraordinary neck, an animal intensity, an actors changefulness. Like Nijinsky he does not mind offending his audience.
On the Nile
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