Merce Cunningham

Advance Praise for Merce Cunningham The Modernizing of Modern Dance “Roger Copeland’s book about the sixty-year career of Merce Cunningham is also a brilliant sixty-year history of theater, dance, art, music and intellectual movements in America. Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance represents almost three decades of work, displayed in a rare depth and scope of ideas. A stylish writer and hard-core analytic thinker, Copeland crosses disciplines with ease. Finally, in an age of turgid theoretical writing, students will see that theory can be delivered in clear prose. An eclectic historian, Copeland relates the past to the present and shows how the multiple arts merge in Cunningham’s choreography. I admire his nimble connections. This is the heart of the matter in Cunningham’s work, and it is what distinguishes this book.” —Sally Sommer, Professor of American Dance Studies at Florida State University “Roger Copeland’s book examines the trajectory of Merce The Choreographer and places him just where I think he belongs—as a global artist of the twentieth century moving in all directions into the twenty-first.” —Valda Setterfield, Member of MCDC 1964–1974 “The best book I’ve read on Cunningham, and by far the most probing—I love it. It places Cunningham squarely in context, delving beyond his well-known use of chance, music, and technology. The connections to Wagner and Brecht are intriguing, as is the relationship of Cunningham to arts other than dance. The book is the first I know to examine Cunningham as part of the circle of musicians around John Cage, so I hope that it reaches a wider audience than the dance community per se; scholars and enthusiasts of Cage, Feldman, Brown, Wolff, Oliveros, and others should take a good look at it. Furthermore, the book shows Cunningham’s constant interest in exploring movement and how we see it.” —Allen Fogelsanger Director of Music for Dance, Cornell University “Roger Copeland’s opus on Merce Cunningham and his Dance Company examines the nature of a maverick career which reinvented an art form. We know what happened to Modern Dance and Ballet in America: they were shaken to their dimensional roots in space and time. Copeland gives us a mature thesis of how it happened and compiles philosophies, art and dance history to propose why it happened—why we all dance the way we currently do.” —Steve Paxton “Copeland’s Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance is a must read for anyone who has an avid interest in contemporary culture. The breath of his vision encompasses many divergent yet complimentary artistic worlds as he reveals the inherent complexities of arguably the worlds most influential choreographer.” —Joseph V.Melillo, Executive Producer, BAM Merce Cunningham The Modernizing of Modern Dance Roger Copeland ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 1000 1 http://www.routledge-ny.com/ Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE http://www.routledge.co.uk/ Copyright © 2004 by Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 0-203-64198-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-67739-0 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-96574-8 (hb) 0-415-96575-6 (pb) For my parents, Marjorie Ann Copeland and Hyman Lawrence Copeland “What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else…. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” —Samuel Beckett, 1961 A.A Violent Order is Disorder; And B.A Great Disorder Is An Order. These Two Things Are One. [Pages of Illustrations] —Wallace Stevens, “Connoisseur Of Chaos,” 1942 “The logic of one event coming as responsive to another seems inadequate now. We look at and listen to several at once. For dancing, it was all those words about meaning that got in the way. Right now, they are broken up. they do not quite fit, we have to shuffle and deal them out again.” —Merce Cunningham, Changes, 1968 “If Cunningham’s work doesn’t add up in a linear way, that doesn’t mean it’s abstract. It means that life doesn’t add up in a linear way…. It may not look like Red Riding Hood and the wolf, but that’s still who it is.” —Mark Morris, as quoted by Joan Acocella in Mark Morris, 1993 “Does dance depend? Or is it independent? Questions that seem political. They arose in an aesthetic situation. What’s to be said? People and sounds interpenetrate.” —John Cage, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” 1963 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 From Graham to Cunningham: An Unsentimental Education 21 2 Portrait of the Artist as a Jung Man 44 3 Beyond the Ethos of Abstract Expressionism 58 4 The Limitations of Instinct 71 5 Contemporary Classicism: Rediscovering Ballet 82 6 Primitive imitive Mysteries 103 7 The Sound of Perceptual Freedom 136 8 Cunningham, Cage, and Collage 153 9 Dancing for the Digital Age 168 10 Rethinking the Thinking Body: The Gaze of Upright Posture 187 11 Modernism, Postmodernism, and Cunningham 209 12 Fatal Abstraction: Merce Cunningham in the Age of Identity Politics 225 13 Dancing in the Aftermath of 9/11 239 Bibliography 260 Index 269 Acknowledgments This book has been a long time comin’. It started life as an essay in The New Republic nearly a quarter-century ago. Over the years, early drafts of various chapters have appeared in Partisan Review, Dance Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, Performing Arts Journal and other publications. But why has it taken so long to complete? “Complete” is a very odd word to invoke with regard to Merce Cunningham, who—84 years old as of this writing—shows no signs of slowing his choreographic output. Alas, one of the problems with writing about an artist as prolific as Cunningham is that he enables you to procrastinate in good conscience. There was that moment in the early 1980’s—I remember it well—when I took a deep breath and declared, “Now or never…. Time to bring this project to some sort of completion.” But a second voice in the back of my head whispered “Not so fast.” What about all those new works for film and video that Cunningham was then creating in collaboration with artists like Charles Atlas and (a little later) Elliot Caplan? Wouldn’t it be wise to wait and see where all that fresh work is heading? Ten years later, in the early 1990’s, I felt a similar determination to finish…until it dawned on me that Cunningham was just then embarking on a seminal series of explorations involving the computer and other forms of digital technology. What looked like light at the end of the publication tunnel turned out to be the flicker of the computer screen on which Cunningham was now composing his dances. And on it went, until just a few years ago when I came to the sobering realization that 2003 would mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Arbitrary though they may be, deadlines—like anniversaries—serve necessary purposes. Without them, the waiting game could continue indefinitely. To wit: as this manuscript goes to press, Cunningham is preparing to collaborate with two of the most adventurous art rock bands on the planet: Radiohead and Sigur Rós. After decades of working primarily with the electronic avant-garde, this may well inaugurate a new era of partnership between Cunningham and the outer fringes of popular music. As usual, I feel a strong temptation to pull the emergency brake; but for better or for worse, we’re past the point of no return. When a project takes this long to complete, it accumulates a long list of debts, both personal and professional. I’m especially grateful to the many friends and colleagues who read and commented on portions of the manuscript: Sally Banes, Steve Paxton, Valda Setterfield, Lynn Garafola, Mindy Aloff, Roger Shattuck, Stanley Kauffmann, Allen Fogelsanger, and Laura Jacobs. Lisa Naugle and the late Iris Garland helped me to understand some of the ways in which Cunningham utilizes computer software as a choreographic tool. The National Endowment for the Humanities and The Rockefeller Foundation were both generous enough to grant me fellowships that permitted time for research and writing that would otherwise have been devoted to teaching. For archival assistance, I want to thank David Vaughan of The Cunningham Dance Foundation, Laura Kuhn at the John Cage Trust, and Madeline Nichols and her marvelous staff at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Naomi Stern indirectly subsidized my near monthly trips into New York City by both putting me up in her apartment and putting up with me.

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