It’s hard to think of staid, old Wheeler Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus as an historic site, although Bay Area dance lovers with very long memories would have no trouble plastering the place with those stickers that affirm venerability. It was here, 42 years ago (long before Zellerbach Hall was built) that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company made its local debut.
And it was here in Wheeler Thursday evening (Nov. 6) that choreographer Cunningham, now 89, met his admirers for a question and answer session, a preface to a fortnight of performances and special events, part of a two-week residency whose like we shall not see again. Cal Performances director Robert Cole introduced Cunningham as the greatest dancemaker of our time, and few among us, conscious of the manner in which Cunningham (and his late life partner, composer John Cage), have transformed our expectations and complicated our responses to dance, would venture to disagree. This is Cole’s farewell season at Cal Performances and he could not possibly have departed his post with more style. If you’re counting, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has played Berkeley on 23 different occasions over the years.
Queried by the company’s executive director Trevor Carlson, Cunningham reminisced with the serene wit one finds in his dances. He traced the cornerstone of his aesthetic, the absence of causality between the collaborative elements of performance (movement, sound, décor) to an experiment undertaken with Cage in the 1940s, when Cunningham was still a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company (you can find, somewhere on You Tube, his recorded performance in Graham’s Appalachian Spring, a study in religious fervor as searing now as it was 60 years ago). Cunningham noted that he and Cage worked independently on this project, a program of six solos, within an agreed-upon time limit, and the results (“difficult, but fascinating,” said Cunningham) have resounded through the decades. The pair labored within a specific rhythmic structure, and there were places, Cunningham noted with sublime understatement, “where we even met.”
Berkeley, Cunningham said, has always been central to his company’s history. It was here that his monumental, in-the-round Ocean received its American premiere in the Harmon Gymnasium, and it was here that BIPED, that wistfully beautiful essay created with LifeForms software technology, was introduced. BIPED, perhaps the most sensuous introduction to Cunningham, is on the programs this weekend and next. Tonight’s concert will also include Suite for Five, which, accompanied by a Cage score, was premiered on that first visit.
For some of us, these will be heady weeks, a chance for rediscovery and an opportunity to witness Cunningham’s latest creation, Craneway Event, a site-specific work tailored for the former Ford assembly plant in Richmond, now called Ford Point. The company will perform on three small stages within the hangar-like building; the audience will be free to roam from stage to stage. There are still a few tickets remaining for Sunday’s performances at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. That Cunningham’s dances can be reconfigured for any number of different spaces (Ocean was given earlier this fall in a quarry in Minnesota) is only one of several aspects of his work that raise profound questions about the nature of the artistic experience. That Cunningham has always embraced technology (ipods will be for rent for tonight’s performance of eyeSpace) as much as he has followed chance procedures (Saturday evening’s Split Sides, with its 32 different possible combinations of events) seems to make him the most paradoxical of great artists.
Cunningham has always recruited some of the finest musical minds of his generation, and this visit will be no exception. In addition to Cage, the featured composers this weekend and next will include Gavin Bryars (a haunting score for BIPED), Mikel Rouse, David Behrman, Annea Lockwood, Conlon Nancarrow and rock groups Radiohead and Sigur Ros. The engagement will also feature the local premiere of Cunningham’s recent XOVER. It is true that many people simply “do not get” Cunningham. To “get him” means jettisoning your notions of what you have been conditioned to believe what dance should be and allowing yourself to be intoxicated by the beauty of sheer movement. Over the next two weekends, a few souls may, for the first time, “get” Cunningham and I envy that transformational experience. It will be the second this week.
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Berkeley residency runs through Nov. 16. For complete information about programs, film showings and special events, go to www.calperformances.org
