More Merce!

We went to hear French dance company CNDC Angers in a program of all Cunningham.  We saw them last year doing a Cunningham "Event", a mixture of different Cunningham pieces.  This year, they did three distinct pieces.  The first, "Inlets 2", was set to a score by John Cage, which featured three people doing things with different size conch shells and water.   They performed with the original shells from Cage's performance, courtesy of the John Cage trust.

The piece was a "nature" inspired piece.  I was fascinated by the rhythms that emerge from dancers who move without reference to a musical score.  It's hard to explain how it feels; it's just that the rhythms of body movement are somehow fundamentally different from the rhythms of music, and I find it so compelling when the dancers are moving together to their own, unheard rhythms.

The highlight of the program was the next piece, "Places", created in 1966, and set to recorded score by Gordon Mumma for bandoneon and computer.  The piece was last performed in 1971 until its very recent reconstruction by CNDC Angers artistic director Robert Swinston.   It was very dramatic (for Cunningham) and I was mesmerized by the performance of the dancers.   Mumma's score was not dramatic, of course; it was a series of drawn out sonorities.   Which which worked perfectly for the piece.

The last piece was set to readings from John Cage's stories, with two live readers who sometimes overlapped with each other.  The choreography was in a lighter, humorous vein.   I initially found it somewhat disconcerting to be listening to a verbal narrative; I found it hard to focus on the movement when I was listening to a story.   But eventually I got to a place where it started to work, and once again Cunningham had expanded my perceptual abilities.  
The evening reinforced the notion that Cunningham is truly one of the greatest choreographers; and that I need to see much, much more of his work.  I can't praise the CNDC Angers enough for keeping this work alive; I wish more small dance companies over the world would do his work.   It does need to be stated, however, that Cunningham is not audience friendly in the way today's world thinks that art should be, especially in the realm of music.  Audiences are easily turned off by music that sounds really strange.



The choreographer Trisha Brown died recently.  In summing up her career, several people noted that in the beginning of her career she used no music.  Eventually she did start using music, and when she was asked why, she only half facetiously said, "I got tired of the coughing".  


One of the highlights of last fall was the performance of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's "Vortex Temporis" set to Grisey's  piece of the same name.  Recently  MOMA announced that an "installation" version of the piece, lasting some eight hours, would be performed in the atrium during museum hours.   Apparently Keersmaeker has created this version of the  piece and it has been performed before; the work has somehow been deconstructed and reconfigured to be performed in an open gallery space over an extended period of time.   I was curious to see and hear what this would be; but, on the other hand, I was pretty sure that I would dislike it, and that I would not be happy hearing Grisey performed in the noisy, cavernous space of MOMA's atrium.   So I didn't go.   I should have, I suppose.   But I was very amused to read of the review of the piece in the New York Times, when the reviewer mentioned the pleasure of hearing Grisey's avant-garde music echoing through the halls of MOMA.   For, as the reviewer put it, MOMA is really not "comfortable" with avant-garde music.   It's too modern for them.  They like Bjork better.