2 Cunningham dancers.

DERRY SWAN

A YEAR WITH MERCE

A young dancer discovers the challenges of joining a major company.

For almost any young modern dancer, getting into the Merce Cunningham Dance Company would be a dream come true. Cunningham is one of the world's great choreographers, and his dancers are as superb, majestic, and consummately trained as any in modern dance. But what happens when a dream comes true? When you cross the horizon of your imagination, what awaits you on the other side?

On January 2, 1996, the dream began to come true for Derry Swan, a twenty-five-year-old dancer from warthmore, Pennsylvania. That's the date she was taken on as a member of the Cunningham company's Repertory Understudy Group. Two months later she was asked to join (he company itself.

At the time Swan hadn't even known how much longer she would continue to dance. Life as an aspiring dancer was stressful and bare-bones. "For a long time I was running around from job to job to class to rehearsal," she says, "trying to fit in all the pieces where I could. Every day I would have to figure out a different schedule, making sure I had all the right clothes with me, squeezing in things when I had half an hour free." The jobs--clerical work, babysitting--provided just enough to get by. Her apartment was a tiny studio she could use only five days a week, crashing at her boyfriend's the other two nights.

Swan had begun dance classes at age nine with a good local ballet teacher, but the typical dancer's childhood never sat well with her. "My family would always give me pointe shoes and little ballerina music boxes and stuff, but I was never into it," she says. "I had the pink bedroom with toe shoe posters on the wall, but I hated it. It never did feel like mine."

As it turned out, Swan was gifted with an unusually fine instrument--easy hips, beautiful feet, and, most conspicuously, extraordinarily powerful legs. For a long time she allowed herself to make do with what she had. "I'd always been naturally flexible," she says, "but I never worked hard when I was little. In fact, until I started taking class at Cunningham, the things that came naturally I did, and everything else I kind of muddled through."

Swan chose Barnard College for its combination of academic excellence and a good dance department. There she began to discover an alternative to ballet. "It was a combination of things. You go through this feminist phase where you think that bunheads are about women not standing up for themselves and their rights. I got tired of the pretty, happy stories; and working with choreographers there I discovered a lot of different forms of modern dance. And everyone in the ballet classes would be very neat and wear the pretty skirts, and I've never been good at being like that. I felt kind of gawky and silly, and then I found this other way--that it was okay to have rips in your tights and not have perfect hair or wear makeup."

After graduation Swan decided to continue working with Neta Pulvermacher, a choreographer she had met at school. The choice was a difficult one to make for a Barnard graduate. "I worried for a long time. You know, `Women have to go out into the work world and prove themselves.' A lot of my friends did that when they graduated, and I was, well, dancing and babysitting. But I loved Neta's work. We'd go to rehearsal and discuss everything, and we helped choreograph, too. For the first two years she paid us what she could, a few dollars a month. I couldn't even afford to take class. Everything else that I did was so I could do that, even though I knew that it wasn't going to get me anywhere."

Swan began to study at the Cunningham studio--not for artistic reasons but because the studio offers a scholarship program that finally enabled her to take class on a regular basis. But if she came to Cunningham for the money, she stayed for the purity of the technique and the seriousness with which it is taught there: "Right off the bat I knew that Cunningham technique was really special. Something about those classes in particular--I've never worked as hard, and I've never felt as good as I do about anything else. It's the same thing every day, but there's so much within it. It's almost like a meditation, I think. It's beautiful."

After a few months, she caught the eye of Patricia Lent, a former Cunningham dancer and a member of the studio faculty who was choosing students for a repertory workshop. "What I saw in Derry," Lent says, "was a dancer who had a lot of natural talent, but who also had the ability to change. Her body is really, really smart. You'd make a correction, and there'd be a visual change. That's one of the things that's not obvious to people. When someone's picked for a company, they'll say, `All these people are good enough.' Yes, they're good enough, but the question is, where are they going to be a year from now?"

About a year later, after she had become one of the most promising young dancers at the studio, Swan got her big opportunity with the impending retirement of Jenifer Weaver, Cunningham's leading female virtuoso. One day she was just another student, scraping by financially and wondering how much longer she'd even want to keep trying; and the next day she was being asked to step into roles created for a dancer she had revered for years. Cunningham, she learned, does not hold auditions.

"You have to just hang around and work," Lent says. "I didn't get the impression that Derry had a whole lot of confidence about her prospects, which was shocking to me because she seemed so obviously right for the company. She's a tall woman who didn't try to act small. And she has a very beautiful, luscious quality of movement. You can't teach that--you can't really even learn it. It's just an extension of your personality."

Swan spent her two months as an understudy frantically learning steps. The most difficult passage in Weaver's repertory turned out to be a little phrase that occurs right at the beginning of Ocean, Cunningham's immensely difficult ninety-minute masterpiece. Frederic Gafner, the company's outstanding male dancer, performs a solo; then the woman comes out for a solo of her own. Almost immediately, with her torso and free leg horizontal to the floor, she must releve and promenade, without preparation, half a turn around, then half a turn back. "I've tried it a hundred times," Swan said during the weeks she was learning the move, "and I've done it twice--both times with nobody watching."

Work with the company began on March 4. Class ended, rehearsal began, and Cunningham simply said, in his understated way, "Ocean, first solo." Gafner danced, then it was Swan's turn. "It was a mess," she says, "and I knew it would be, and everyone else knew it would be, but still--the first thing I ever have to do is go out by myself with everyone watching." Weaver gave some corrections, then Swan danced the solo again, considerably better. "It was hard," she recalled soon after. "The first few days, especially, I was so scared to be in rehearsal with these amazing dancers, and have me be the focus of attention, and everything having to stop every time I didn't know something. But it was exciting, too, and when things went well I felt really good. But it was hard."

The rest of the company helped ease the transition. "People were really welcoming and patient and helpful," she says, "and just nice and encouraging. I hadn't really been friends with them before joining, but right away, the day I got my contract, a few of them took me out for a celebratory drink. They told funny stories about all the times they'd messed up--missing entrances and things like that. It's a really close-knit company."

Her debut with the company was to be in Berkeley in April in a performance of Ocean. She still had trouble with that opening solo. "I walked around cursing for a while, but then I just told myself to shut up, because you really can't do anything about it. It's over, move on, and hopefully the next time it'll work." In the end, the performance was fun--"a surprising amount of fun." Afterward, though, the four months of accumulated anxiety caught up with her: "I started to feel awful about everything. Like, `Why am I here? What am I doing?' I was fantasizing that maybe Jenifer would want her place back, because she can have it, because I can't deal with feeling like this all the time." Once again, she regained her focus through class. As for the releve phrase from the opening solo, Cunningham showed her an easier way to do it--the way that Weaver had actually done it herself. "There's perfection," Swan said at the time, "and then there's what really happens. Besides, it doesn't matter to Merce. He likes to see people try, whether or not you succeed."

The biggest test came in August: six performances of Ocean at Lincoln Center--a greater physical challenge than anyone in the company had ever faced. For Swan, it also meant her first exposure to the glare of New York City critics, as well as her first appearance as a Cunningham dancer before family and friends. By this point, though, something was beginning to happen within her dancing itself. "There were a few nights when I felt that the solo was mine," she says, "and not me doing someone else's part. Dress rehearsal night, I did it differently than I had ever rehearsed it, and I don't even know why. The rhythm, the attack. Not that it was technically great, but it felt like I was dancing instead of worrying about it."

By autumn, after a summer of extensive touring, Swan had finally stopped feeling like the new kid on the block. For one thing, another dancer had come in since she joined. With the modest salary she was drawing, she was able to move out of her five-day-a-week studio and into a spacious East Village apartment with her boyfriend. Even the anxiety was beginning to go away. "I've learned to shut up about all the things that worry me about me. When I first started taking company class, I was so insecure about how I was, but now I'm so concentrated on trying to do what's being given that I don't have time or energy to worry."

Something else arose that did cause concern--a lower back injury that had appeared in October and worsened over, the following weeks. "It's not awful," she said, "but it's really discouraging. In class the other day, everything I did hurt. I'm trying to start maintaining it better--getting physical therapy and trying to work everything correctly and learning how to stretch it right . . . It's so challenging and exciting, every bit of it . . . There's so much freedom and so much room to grow. That it's a great company is just an added benefit."

Bill Deresiewicz reports on the New York City dance scene for London's Financial Times.

THOMAS CALEY

PRESENT PERFECT

Thomas Caley has started off on the right feet in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

If you've seen the Merce Cunningham Dance Company lately, you know who Thomas Caley is, though you may not know his name. Even in this troupe of physically gifted, eloquently articulated physiques, one need only say, "He's the man with those feet!" and it's clear who he is. Those glorious extremities, darting through space with utter precision, have made Caley's dancing a target of my envious focus since he joined the company in 1993.

But his performance in Cunningham's magnificent, ninety-minute Ocean at Lincoln Center Festival 96 made it clear how far his dancing has now transcended mere technical flawlessness--and spectacular insteps. Caley has become a compellingly present artist--generous in spirit, gracious, and joyful.

I'm impressed by the modest self-confidence and well-groundedness of his articulate conversation as we chat in his elegantly spare East Village apartment, discreetly adorned with small paintings and drawings. The artworks belong to his dancer roommate whose parents are artists, he says. The youngest of four brothers, growing up in suburban Michigan, Caley spent lots of time playing in the woods by a lake, getting to know himself. "There was lots of outdoors and few friends near me, so I had to go inward and figure things out for myself."

Now, picture this regal, willowy, dark-eyed six-footer at age five, bursting forth from behind his bedroom window curtain and "jumping around" to recordings he'd purloined from his older brother--just one of the little dance shows he liked to put on for himself and an occasional playmate. His mother said, "You've really got rhythm!"

In high school Caley was not interested in the sports and beer drinking that preoccupied his peers. His best friend growing up wanted to be a writer, and when she went away to Interlochen Arts Academy in her sophomore year, he was deeply unhappy. In their constant phone conversations she encouraged him to join her at the school. His father, an aspiring sculptor and architect before taking over his family's insurance business, encouraged his son's artistic pursuits. At age fifteen he was allowed to leave home and attend Interlochen.

"I really didn't know exactly what I was going to go for," he says. "Then suddenly--what made up my mind I don't know--I was auditioning for dance, and it worked out. After Interlochen I still wasn't sure this was what I wanted to devote my life to; I wasn't sure that dancing could be a `real career,' but a bunch of us went off to SUNY-Purchase together. That's where my real training began."

At Purchase he focused first on ballet, since he was already familiar with it: "The teachers mostly ignored me. Because I could mimic anything, even though I had no idea what I was really doing, I learned by copying what the others did." In Graham class he was placed in the most advanced group, although he'd had no previous exposure to the technique. With amusement he recalls his bafflement. His only prior taste of contemporary dance had been jazz and a hybrid, amorphous modern style at Interlochen. Because of his kinetic aptitude and perfect body form, his previous teachers had often assumed that he understood what he was doing, technically, far more than he did.

"I thought [Graham technique] was beautiful," he recalls, "although I didn't relate to the kind of emotion attached to it. I'm not an angry person, and to harbor all that just to create the technique was a bit unreal to me. But the structure of the technique is beautiful."

The couple of years away from home before he arrived at college gave him a maturity many of his classmates lacked. He was ready to focus: "I was praised for doing things well in ballet, but it never connected for me. I felt like a puppy or a colt. Limbs were moving, but I had no idea how they got there." He soaked up new dance material like a sponge, despite occasional admonitions from impatient Graham instructors that he was holding the group back. Nonetheless, Caley enjoyed performing choreography by the SUNY-Purchase faculty, including Cunningham alumnus Neil Greenberg. After graduation he went to the Cunningham Studio in New York City.

Although he seems a natural Cunningham dancer, with perfect turnout, flexible hips, and spectacularly arching feet, Caley admits that he resisted the I Cunningham method at first. "I was duplicating superficial ideas about what Cunningham style was, but I disagreed with the timing--especially of the jumping." He felt he'd learned to dance at Purchase in a way that worked for him, and he was hesitant to give it up.

Merce's taciturn way of teaching gives dancers no overt clues about how to accomplish his difficult oblique balances, lightning-fast jumping combinations, and footwork patterns that boggle the memory. I asked Caley what had helped him achieve his breakthrough.

"I guess it was the struggle," he says. "If you're long and flexible, strength is hard to get. That was the hardest thing for me: a sense of keeping things connected within my center."

The wall came down after about a year of stubbornness and frustration at the Cunningham studio: "Why don't you give this a fair chance? I said to myself. Of course, then I realized that you don't give up anything; you just add more. That's when I told Chris [Komar] I really would like to work there. All the information I'd been getting finally accumulated, and all of a sudden it began to make sense. Cunningham's rhythm is like no one else's, and that's what makes his work so different."

Cunningham dancers over the years have often garnered a reputation for the austerity of their performing demeanors. But lately, there's more overt collegiality in the dancing. The extraordinary confidence and calm presence Caley brings to Cunningham's abstraction made me curious about his mental process while performing. Some Cunningham dancers create little narratives to animate the steps for themselves, especially during technically treacherous movement passages, when some distraction can be helpful in easing the tension of intense concentration.

"I don't make up any plot line, per se," Caley says. "I dance from moment to moment. My story line is about connecting with the other dancers. When I'm technically overchallenged--which happens--that makes me more reserved, and I look toward a time I can relax and go further. If I'm not there yet, I just say, Okay, you'll get there.

"Right now, we're all about the same age and friendly with each other, and we're not told not to show that onstage. I don't want to build a wall around myself onstage; I want to draw people in. I don't believe I have to entertain, either, but I look for the moments where I can find freedom. Otherwise you're just taking one long class onstage with people watching--and paying!"

Is there dancemaking in his future? Choreography intimidated him in college, Caley says. He felt that he needed to know more technically before daring to make dances of his own. He's not satisfied by dances that are just displays of beautiful technical movement, declaring with typical insight, "My generation doesn't take enough time to explore; they just want an end result. Good or bad, who cares? That doesn't interest me. My classmates were turning out lots of dances. But I think you can learn so much more if you take longer to find out what your work is about."

He enjoys many non-Western forms of dance. Though he doesn't feel that he could perform them, they are influences: "I haven't found my voice yet, but I'm starting the process of exploring."

And what about dancing life after Cunningham? Since Caley is not interested in merely preserving the repertory as a museum legacy after Cunningham is no longer at the helm, he says that he'll move on to other work. But the inveterate performer definitely wants to continue dancing: "Pine Bausch's work is interesting. Something completely different from Merce."

Gus Solomons jr is a New York City critic for Dance Magazine and the artistic director of The Solomons Company/Dance.