Word: dancers
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Merce Cunningham, once a principle dancer in Martha Graham's company, broke away from his mentor in the late forties to form his own dance troupe in New York. At the same time Cunningham was involved in the artistic experiments at Black Mountain College, taking part in the first "happening" along with composer John Cage and working alongside writers such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley (Olson once composed a prose choreography for Cunningham called "Apollonius of Tyana."). Cunningham is known for using chance methods in his choreography, even to the point where the flip of a coin would determine...
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...
...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...
Pour the sack and pop the bubbly Slosh the Chivas and slosh it doubly. On Dancer, on Prancer, on Donner, on Blitzen...
...other stories, the remoteness and haze are carried to an extreme. The characters become flat, or stylized to the point of implausibility. In "Lightning North of Paris," Helprin is unable to bring to life the garret affair between two Americans in Paris, a composer and a ballet dancer; wrapped up in his descriptions of the composer's wild moments when he writes "music which if played for pigeons would have made them rise in intolerance and bend in a sheet of white and gray across the plane of Paris sky," Helprin is happily oblivious of the fact that...