Word: cunningham
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Merce Cunningham, a collection of photographs and eclectic writings on the choreographer, attempts to get at Cunningham's elusive spirit. Yet the pages of photographs detailing Cunningham's features reveal no more than Klosty's first blurred picture, nor do the accompanying pieces penned by members of Cunningham's company. Almost all fifteen contributors cut short their reflections with the observation that Cunningham is a very private and inscrutable human being...
John Cage, painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and others pay special homage to Cunningham, attempting to understand him as a teacher, performer, collaborator and creator. They know in their bones--though Klosty is the only one so bold as to say so--that the gathering of artists, musicians and dancers around Cunningham in the fifties was as significant a group in the history of the arts as was Bloomsbury or Gertrude Stein's "charmed circle." After the second World War, the arts in New York took on a vitality and strength which Cunningham and his followers helped to create...
Carolyn Brown, Cunningham dancer for twenty years, writes with the most perspective and the most acceptance. She admits how difficult it is to work under Cunningham's aloofness, although she's thankful that his hands-off attitude forces his dancers to be "self-disciplined, self-critical, and self-moving." She describes how Cunningham adheres to John Cage's belief in rejecting all forms of subservience, and sympathizes with his uneasiness at shouldering responsibility for company members' spirits...
Brown argues against the popular conception of Cunningham's dance as having no meaning, a subject none of the other writers touch. Acknowledging that Cunningham leaves few clues about what he's doing, she nonetheless insists that "his own dancing is suffused with mystery, poetry and madness--expressive of root emotions, generous yet often frightening in their nakedness." She points to Cunningham's use of the dancer's internal sense of rhythm, explaining that his practice of rehearsing a piece by timing it over and over with a stopwatch is far from mechanical, as is often charged...
Despite her insights Brown never does enter Cunningham's private world. She knows he never will reveal certain sides of himself and respectfully leaves him in his studio...