by Leigh Witchel
It was raining Cunningham in April. Besides the splashy centennial celebration at BAM and Stephen Petronio’s revival of “Tread,” there was also The Joyce’s contribution: three companies, CNDC-Angers, Ballet West and The Washington Ballet each performed a Cunningham work. Drawing a line between those three points, you could create a continuum of how Cunningham could look over time.
CNDC-Angers performed “Suite for Five,” from 1956, to John Cage’s prepared piano score played live by Adam Tendler. Carlo Schiavo appeared alone onstage, wearing blue tights and a polo shirt. He moved his legs out in front of him, curling over and into the floor, going into a deep plié as the lights went out.
The lights came back up and the scene changed to Catarina Pernão in yellow. She planted an arabesque and slowly swayed from high up at the top of her supporting leg. Rotating in attitude vibrating her leg like an insect’s feeler, somehow her body remained still.
The company’s artistic director, Robert Swinston, was the Assistant to the Choreographer for Cunningham from 1992, and this was as close as you could get to what the company looked like in that phase of Cunningham’s career. In all the Cunningham homages, we hadn’t seen that rooted use of weight.
Gianni Joseph, Claire Seigle-Goujon and Anna Chirescu ended a trio where Joseph braced himself against the women as if he were collapsing down their sides. Schiavo and Pernão danced a duet where they mirrored one another in silence and ended with him cradling her, but also taking a foot off the floor precariously. The full cast returned for a quiet ending.
If “Suite for Five” was rooted it was also very discrete. That is also how Cunningham choreography felt in the 90s after Cunningham discovered a movement simulator, LifeForms. You noticed the steps more than the phrases: Walk, pose, jump over, touch floor, repeat. Cunningham’s career spanned several decades and stages, if the choreography had more dance impulse at other times, in that era that didn’t feel like the point.
“Summerspace” was done by ballet companies early on. New York City Ballet performed it in 1966; in its first season the NYCB women were on pointe. Ballet West danced it barefoot, a different level of approach and training for ballet dancers approaching Cunningham’s work in the intervening half century.
Kaitlyn Addison entered running in a circle. Others followed and you could immediately see the difference in quality when ballet-centric dancers perform Cunningham: they use weight completely differently. The most obvious place it was visible was extensions: perhaps surprisingly, but this was also the case with Sara Mearns in the BAM celebration. Ballet dancer’s legs go up as if the joints were loose hinges. Metaphorically ballet dancers are trained to imagine lifting from underneath the leg, and it’s supposed to go up easily. There’s little opposition, or resistance, and there isn’t supposed to be.
Ballet West’s dancers danced “Summerspace” like ballet dancers, but they didn’t turn it into ballet. Chelsea Keefer rotated in arabesque, her hands in almost a character pose from Raymonda, but she kept the leg low and didn’t make that look like a step from a variation.
Some things did look watered down. The arms in fast positions were so light as to seem only like indications, Joshua Shutkind’s head movements in a solo looked like bird imitations. But he also bent down into fourth position with an amazingly deep plié and Kyle Davis entered to jump in arabesque where the supporting leg picked up to meet the leg in the air. Over and over. Loudly. Without dropping his arabesque. It was astonishing, and as Danilova said, “Make them think it’s hard” – except it actually was. Davis has legs like pile drivers and he turned that jump into as much of a virtuoso feat as any step in a variation.
The ballet wasn’t danced to the orchestrated Feldman score but to a live piano augmented by a recorded one. Watching Ballet West dance Cunningham didn’t feel like adulteration but a translation. This was not Cunningham technique; this was Cunningham performed by ballet dancers.
“Duets” has a different long history of being danced by ballet companies. It was made in 1980, set on American Ballet Theatre in 1982, and when it was last performed by them in 2011, The Washington Ballet’s current artistic director, Julie Kent, danced it.
By that time, the work had morphed into its own hybrid animal. You hadn’t lived until you saw Veronika Part misinterpret “Duets,” switching hands on her partner’s arm like a cat trying to knead a comfy place to lie down and nap. “Duets” was staged for TWB by Melissa Toogood, but if you pictured the evening’s works as a line, it was the furthest point away from Cunningham. Occasionally in perversely delightful ways.
The first duet was danced as if it were a ballet pas de deux: not any kind of transposition, just straight ballet. Extension, arabesque, attitude, then add a torso tilt or a head twitch. The third duet involved the woman rotating in fast attitudes, with her partner patting her with his hands as if that were partnering. She jumped on his back in a move straight out of “The Cage.” The same move that Veronika Part did so oddly at ABT didn’t disappoint here either. The woman switched hands as if she where banging away at a toy piano. And if you hummed along quietly with the fifth couple’s dance, it fit perfectly to “The Varsity Drag.”
No matter how odd “Duets” might have looked to someone who was looking at it as a Cunningham dance, TWB’s performance had its own tradition – it was danced as it was when Kent danced with ABT. And as time goes on, performance tradition outweighs the original text. The centennial celebrations were an early, revealing moment on the map and timeline of the Cunningham diaspora.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
Merce Cunningham Celebration
“Suite for Five,” “Summerspace,” “Duets” – CNDC Angers, Ballet West, The Washington Ballet
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
April 17, 2019
Cover: Claire Seigle-Goujon, Catarina Pernão, Carlo Schiavo, and Anna Chirescu in “Suite for Five.” Photo © Arnaud Hie.
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