Word: cunninghame
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...Leotard read a newspaper while marking time to the wail of the trombone by flipping a garbage can lid with her foot. The men at the bridge tables popped the champagne bottle, set off the alarm clock, threw streamers and lighted sparklers. "Fifteen!" cried Cage, and Sneakers (Dancer Merce Cunningham) rushed forth petulantly snipping at his hair with scissors while the pianist (David Tudor) polished the piano strings with a buffer and the tuba player (Don Butterfield) stripped to the waist, slipped on a jacket and had a drink...
Motion & Stillness. On last week's program the two principal pieces, both choreographed by Cunningham, were Summer-space and Antic Meet, set to music by two modernists-Morton Feldman, 35, and John Cage, 47. The first, described as "a lyric dance," was an impressionistic work evoking the shimmering heat of summer, the play of light and shade. It was danced before a pointillistic backdrop of blue and green, and the dancers wore similarly dappled costumes (the spots were sprayed on with a paint gun), which permitted them to disappear into and emerge from the scenery as if they were...
Antic Meet, set to squeaking, creaking, honking music conducted by Composer Cage himself, was mostly satirical-a spoof of social conventions, sports, the modern dance itself. At one point Cunningham pulled on and off a multisleeved sweater in a pointed jab at Martha Graham's fondness for dressing and undressing while dancing. At another he appeared in white coveralls and went through a marvelously loose-limbed parody of vaudeville-style dancing, with broad suggestions of Fred Astaire. The piece contained few outright ballet laughs, but it was distinguished by the clean, sculptural style that is the mark of Cunningham...
...Symbols. Choreographer Cunningham, 38, learned his first fancy steps from an oldtime vaudeville performer who taught him a sailor's hornpipe in a special soft-shoe version. That was back home in Centralia, Wash., where Cunningham grew up, the son of a country lawyer. In those days he used to tap-dance at the local Grange Hall, eventually graduated to a summer session at California's Mills College, where he met Martha Graham and agreed to join her company. In the Graham years he danced male leads in such works as Letter to the World and Appalachian Spring...
...Cunningham professes to be utterly bewildered by complaints that his work is obscurely symbolic. "Symbols," says he, "don't interest me. You see a chair strapped on my back. Can't we just say, 'How strange...