Word: cunningham
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is exactly what happens in "Squaregame," one of seven dances offered by avant-garde master Merce Cunningham and his company in performances at Boston English High School last week. The four bunches of sacks which initially define the peripheries of movement become tongue-in-cheek metaphors for the dancers' own bodies. The sacks are whirled or swung or tossed through space; Cunningham himself falls dead-weight on a group of dancers and is dragged across the floor like a sack; later, he is tossed up and down between two dancers the way two children would flip an unwieldy pillow...
THAT WAS THE THEME of last week's recitals, as it has been of all Cunningham's choreography: the basic processes of the human body's motion, discerned with a painstaking and endlessly refreshing eye. Like a painter absorbed in something as slight as the fall of light on a glass jar, Cunningham is fascinated by the eloquent detail: a dancer's leg arcing upward like a searchlight against the sky, the drift of weight in space when the body leans slowly backwards, dancers bounding across the stage like stones skipped across water. The patterns aren't only visual, either...
Often, the building-block of a Cunningham choreographic sequence is a very basic component of movement, something so radically simple that ordinarily one wouldn't think about it at all. The subject of "Torse," for instance, is change of weight: the disturbance of symmetry when weight shifts from one foot to another, the still points of fragile equilibrium when a dancer balances on one leg, the other crooked in the air behind her. Like a drop of oil spreading through cloth, the point of focus begins to color one's perception of all kinds of movement: a jump becomes weight...
FROM SUCH SLIGHT BEGINNINGS--a weight change, a fleeting gesture--Cunningham builds dances of astonishing variety and imagination. He is one of the few choreographers whose complexity of motion suggests the intricacy of the body's inner processes...
...slot number five, Eleanor Cunningham breezed by her Bowdoin Bear...