Wednesday, April 15,2009
Lord Have Merce
Sonic Youth and other music pals play 90-year-old Cunningham’s birthday bash
By Joshua David Stein
The Merce Cunningham Company Dancers rehearse with the nearly 90-year-old choreographer. Sonic Youth wouldn't seem like a good birthday party band for most 90-year-olds. But Merce Cunningham isn’t your average nonagenarian. He doesn’t go in for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and pudding. But what more would you expect from the man who continually reaffirms his relevance as the most important modern dance choreographer since Martha Graham?
For his 90th birthday, Merce has invited some friends—among them Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth—to drop by BAM for three days from April 16 to 19 for a jam, and maybe some tea and biscuits too.
Also stopping by: Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and mixed-media sound composer Takehisa Kosugi. Oh, and of course, the Merce Cunningham Company dancers.The event also functions as the pre miere of Nearly Ninety. It’s 89 minutes long. Ol’ Merce is pretty funny for an old guy.
Since the 1950s, when Cunningham began his choreographic career and long fruitful collaboration with composer John Cage, he has done away with staid conventions as dancing to music, dance as narrative and the entire idea that a performance is distinct from creation. Instead, Cunningham has relied on chance procedures to bring movement, music and dance and dancers into fruitful contact.
“The beauty of what Merce does is, it’s happening live and can’t be recreated the same way from night to night,” Ranaldo explains.Therefore, it’s not possible to write a “preview” of a Merce Cunningham dance performance any more than it’s possible to predict if a piece of bread will fall butterside up in a Tilt-a-Whirl caught in a tornado. I won’t even try. I don’t know what to expect at the Howard Gilman Opera House this week any more than any of the other collaborators do.Which is to say, I have a general idea that it will be excellent, but I can’t say exactly why.The only thing to be done is to sketch out the structure, identify the moving parts and maintain faith that a fortuitous wind will animate the structure come opening night.
According to Trevor Carlson, Executive Director of the Merce Cunningham Company, “Each time Merce makes a new piece, we all sort of come together to talk about it. And since it was Merce’s birthday, we sort of said, ‘Let’s go for it!’” So Merce asked his buddy John Paul Jones, who has worked for the company before, and Sonic Youth, members of which had also worked with the company in the past, along with Takehisa Kosugi, the musical director of the company, and asked them each to create 30 minutes of music.
Then he contacted architect Benedetta Tagliabue (wife of the late great Catalan architect, Enric Miralles) to craft a sculpture that would hold the three groups of musicians on stage. Italian fashion designer Romeo Gigli was asked to create the costumes for the piece. Ranaldo was surprised and chuffed to be asked. “It came out of the blue that we were invited to do this,” he says. “But I’ve been a huge fan of his work pretty much since I moved to New York in 1979.”
So Sonic Youth said of course it would participate. So did everyone else. And then everyone went on their separate paths and pretty much forgot about each other. “None of the projects will come together until the day before the performance in their entirety at the dress rehearsal,” says Trevor. “Merce called John Paul Jones to say, ‘Thank you for accepting to compose the piece. I’ll see you in April.’” And that was that.
Sonic Youth set about creating its 30 minutes loosely. “We are going to create different chunks based on basic gestures of principles of attack, loud, soft, aggressive, different things like that,” explains Ranaldo. John Paul Jones, he says, is scoring his piece out in a much more traditional way, though Ranaldo notes he has no idea what his work sounds like. Kosugi, as Kosugi does, has divided his 30 minutes of highly electronic music into eight- or nine-minute discreet chunks. According to Trevor, the music will be cut up, patched back together, overlapped, spliced, separated and mixed according to chance-based procedures.Who knows what it will sound like.
As far as the movements go, well, Merce’s style is Merce’s style. It’s a dry and very difficult blend of chance-based movement—right leg high, left shoulder tilted, head held askew—and a rigorous training in the Graham technique, which gives the moments a fluid and sharp, suspended quality. It’s movement for movement’s sake, stripped of any narrative signifiers. And yet, it’s still oddly moving.
A certain cognitive dissonance occurs when watching all the randomly generated parts of Merce’s choreography move with one other.There’s no story or emotion lurking behind the dance, and yet so strong is the human need to sculpt a narrative, that one is woven from the disjointed fabric of the dance.
If you’ve recently been dumped, perhaps you’ll read the haunting electronic beeps and boops of Kosugi’s score—coupled with the contractions of the dancers—as a study of loss and sadness. If you are getting a large tax refund, you might focus on the joy in the frenzied synergy. If you’re young and green, you might read the piece as an inspirational cry that age doesn’t hamper vitality.
The story isn’t just Merce’s; but it isn’t just yours, either. It’s a combination of chance and talent that, like Almost Ninety, will never be repeated again.
> Merce Cunningham at 90
April 16 (spring gala), 17, 18 & 19. BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., 718-636- 4100; Thurs. 7; Fri.-Sat. 7:30; Sun. 3 p.m., $20-$75.