Merce blasts off to 1980’s outer space in Nearly Ninety

I snuck out of essay writing mode this weekend to check out Merce Cunningham’s latest work at BAM. Dancers in signature body-revealing unitards executed the technical tilts, sustentions, contractions, and mathematical leaps and hops that Cunningham has been working with for the past 54 years of his prolific career. I love the tension between uniformity and precision that the semi-alien dancers use while simultaneously revealing themselves as acutely human in the small wobbles and sudden intakes and exhalations of breath. We marvel at what they can do with their bodies but are aware nonetheless of the intense labor that is being produced as their muscles strain under spandex.

Sitting in the first row of the mezzanine, I saw the dancers as separated from the enormous metal and plastic sparkly set piece that housed musicians John Paul Jones, Takehisa Kosugi, and Sonic Youth (!). Their plane was one of the familiar strips of Marley floor that are common to most dance studios, while other-worldly fractal-like projections inhabited the screen upstage. Meanwhile the mad scientist musicians produced enormous reverberating sounds while silhouetted abstractly against the scrim. I identify with Evan Namerow’s (of Dancing Perfectly Free ) complaint that parts of the piece seemed to lack cohesion but found something charming in the spacey set piece designed by Benedetta Tagliabue. It seemed to be almost scotch-taped together – part crystal, part satellite – a distinctly 1980’s version of the space-age. Sound produced by the musicians nestled in its elaborate spiral staircase structure exploded and sometimes upstaged the dancers who were, from my perspective, still dancing on a recognizable form of planet earth. Meanwhile, video projections by Franc Aleu animated screens and scrims hanging behind the dancers with fractals, water droplets, and other shapes that seemed to mix the aquatic, terrestrial, and the interplanetary.

photo: andrea mohin

The concerns I had with cohesion in the first half were nonexistent in the second part of the piece. Previously shielded by one or more layers of projection-covered cloth, the musicians were fully revealed, connecting them more directly to the dance as it unfolded onstage. Moments of exploding, grating sound were juxtaposed with silence, allowing us to hear the strong ejections of breath, reminding us who was peddling this crazy rickshaw space machine.

photo: andrea mohin

I was most struck by a simple movement. Underneath overlapping screens, one dancer entered the stage after a series of extremely quick, intersecting combinations had carried several other dancers back to the wings. The pulled her hands up her body and over her head, making a recognizable diving gesture. Gracefully folding, she curved downward; moments later she was joined by another dancer who repeated with her the same movement. Above them, a musicians hands demonstrated how the sound was being produced without smoke and mirrors – a Wizard of Oz-like moment in which we see the simple mechanics of rolling screws on a metal tray, amplified to sound like intergalactic collisions. Layered over the demystified music were the upside-down limbs of dancers, clearly of a different historical time, but also clearly Cunningham movers. As the number of dancers diving increased, I couldn’t help but think of passing between worlds. In a sense, Merce is going to space, layering time, and allowing us to contemplate the final leap into the beyond. With hundreds of his former dancers in attendance (they stood up to be recognized), it almost seemed like a going away party, or maybe a launching party. Merce is ninety years old. He joined the dancers for the final bows dressed in black velvet pajamas and riding in a wheelchair.

To the moon…and beyond…



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