Word: cunningham
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Other dances explore not so much the matter of moving as the matter of constructing movement. "Signals," for example, is a gently humorous spoof on the whole business of making dances. As a couple move, Cunningham approaches them flaunting what appears to be a yardstick, poking and measuring the dancing as though fitting a suit of clothes; at another point a group labors through a sequence of banal repetitions, stopping and starting on a rhythmic "hut!" from Cunningham. And while the program listing outlined the dance's sequence in painstaking detail--the segments solemnly labelled "Trio...
Even though the real subject of Cunningham's dances is invariably movement itself, his choreography is by no means expressionless. Rather, the plot and emotional tone the audience perceives in the dances derives from the inherent expressiveness of the gestures, not from subject matter or program notes...
...dances in last week's Boston program suggested particularly strong emotional overtones. In one, "Solo," Cunningham's own dancing captures with eerie accuracy the furtive watchfulness of a hunted animal. From Cunningham's entrance--back swayed, neck stiff, knees bent, arms and hands contorted downwards, the dance is shot through with images of deformity and entrapment. Cunningham hunches down on the floor, all crippled angles, his head and tongue jerking like a lizard's. His hands tremble fitfully, one foot gropes outward in blind patterns, or--suddenly alert in awful stillness--he glances warily offstage. Movements sputter for a moment...
...other work, "Rainforest," is equally disturbing: a stage filled with sinister silver helium balloons is the setting for a dance of desperate energy and haunting tenderness. In both these works, Cunningham's artistry provides the dance, allowing meaning and response to awaken spontaneously in each member of the audience...
...same way, Cunningham's dances go beyond emotional mood to achieve a sense of archetypal form. Familiar gestures are the stuff of much Cunningham choreography, but abstracted onstage from their ordinary context they appear as the organic prototypes of the motions of day-to-day living, acquiring a startling purity the more integral for its understatement. One's encounter with the choreography becomes a series of luminous recognitions; dance stripped of all overt meaning works on the viewer's mind with the power of symbol. And the large structures, wholly intent on unfolding patterns of motion and relation, resonate instead...