50 years of Merce's magic: the Cunningham Dance Company has gone gold.

IF YOU DECIDED TO DO SOME TRES CHIC spring shopping in Paris last April, the first thing you would have seen when you walked into the Left Bank department store called Bon Marche were three Merce Cunningham dancers wearing tres bizarre outfits designed by Rei Kawakubo, the avant-garde couturiere of Commes des Garcons. These were not the dancers in person--the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was touring elsewhere in France at the time--but dancers on a huge poster. Up on the second floor, you could find the costumes without the dancers, suspended in midair as part of an exhibit called "Choreographie de Mode." Also on display were costumes or clothes by, among others, Anke Loh (for Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker), Christian Lacroix (for Karole Armitage), and Issey Miyake (for William Forsythe). On the videotape montage of their work, which was shown on banks of monitors beneath the costumes, the Cunningham excerpt came last. But he, of course, came first, and it was impossible to look at the tape without thinking that without him those other dances would not have been made--or, at any rate not made the way they were. Cunningham is not simply a towering figure in the landscape of modern dance; he is the landscape upon which those who follow build. Yet his excerpted work, Scenario, was among the more recent of the lot, and his costumes were the most radical by a long shot. Here he was, at age 83, still in the avant of the avant-garde.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK, THE COMPANY ADMINISTRATORS AND THE BOARD members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation were busy planning a year of celebration in honor of the company's fiftieth anniversary, beginning at the Lincoln Center Festival in July 2002 and ending--after national and international touring--at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the fall of 2003. There were to be revivals--dances from every decade of his company's rich history--and premieres. Typically, Cunningham (as he had said in an interview just before leaving for France) found the latter more compelling. "I am most interested," he said, "in what I am doing next."

It's been that way for the company's fifty years. In the early modern dance way, his identity is fused with that of his troupe, however singular the individuals' identities. Over that time Cunningham has taken dance apart and put it back together again, spinning off all but what he finds essential. Thus his dances have no overt narratives--what you might call plot--because he doesn't think dance needs them. Nonetheless, the dances are not, to his mind, "abstract." "Character," he says, "comes from how you do a step." The work does teem with incident and drama, but Cunningham lets each viewer decide for himself what the dance means, or what it is about. As it turns out, the dances thus tell us our own tales; Cunningham tells us the stories of our lives.

While Cunningham's works are presented with decor and music, they are made without them. The costumes, the sets, and the scores--usually performed live and often employing electronics--are separate elements, conceived independently. Cunningham always, he says, wants "contemporary ideas about visual art and music." He does not tell the artists what to do. Thus, although the length of the music and the dance are agreed upon at the start of work, they have only duration in common. The dancers hear the score only at a dance's premiere, and the costumes usually arrive late in the game, too. For most of the company's life, the musical director was the late John Cage. Designers have included renegade American art icons Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

From the beginning, Cunningham exploded the stage into fragments the same way Pablo Picasso exploded the canvas. The choreographer further broke away from the ordinary and the personal by using chance procedures as a compositional tool, a methodology that has taken on mythical proportions. As it happens, Cunningham uses chance--casting the I Ching, tossing pennies--at some point in the making of all of his dances; not, he explains, to be arbitrary, but "to allow for possibilities" he might not have seized upon otherwise. (He might decide, to give one example, how many dancers enter at a given point, or how many exit.) Increasingly over the years, he has broken movement into increments--into precise bits, or, one could say, bytes, since the computer (with a program called Life Forms) is now incorporated into his choreographic method. Along the way, he has embraced new technologies--filming techniques, video, computers--in a way that makes one think of T.H. White's Merlin, the marvelous wizard who moved backward though time. Cunningham is already there--wherever we are going next--and we, the world, have to catch up with him. Lately, as in BIPED and his newer work, Loose Time, Cunningham has presented dances that feel like multitasking or channel surfing, with lots of things going on at once. Sometimes he achieves this effect on a single body. It isn't easy work to perform.

IN HIS DANCERS--THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 100 IN HIS COMPANY OVER THE decades--he has looked "for flexibility and resilience." (Strength," he notes, "can be acquired.") They, in turn, have been attracted to him for the possibilities his work offers both the body and the mind. Most have had an intellectual bent allied with a love for technique, and an appetite for complexity. They are undaunted by performing as themselves, without the support of dramatic identities, and they are able to work with the intrinsic rhythm of steps, without music as metric or emotional support. They have come into the company through studio classes, through auditions, and recently, through the Repertory Understudy Group (RUG) that serves as an ongoing laboratory for revivals. Many Cunningham alumni (including Remy Charlip, Gus Solomons jr, and Dan Wagoner) have gone on to form companies of their own. Some have rebelled (Steve Paxton, Charlie Moulton, Neil Greenberg); some have remained, however quirkily, within the fold (Viola Farber, Douglas Dunn, and Karole Armitage). After leaving Martha Graham, Paul Taylor passed briefly through the company. The dancers have also gone on to teach and to set Cunningham's work on other companies. They have informed and influenced the field by dancing in this company, where choreographers are often present in the audience (Bill T. Jones and Mark Morris, for instance).

Just as they are watching, so are we, and so, still, is Cunningham. Until recent years, he still performed regularly in "Events," his seamless signature amalgams of dance excerpts. Now he is perched offstage, timer in hand. ("Rhythm," he says, "is time cut up.") This is perhaps the most notable fact of a notable anniversary. Cunningham is watching his work along with us. Your eyes meet his, as it were, though the dance. After the performance, he joins his dancers. When he comes out onstage and you rise to applaud him, you might reflect that he is standing someplace remarkable, not that he is thinking about it: Cunningham is standing at the nexus of classicism and modernism in the way that Fokine stood at the nexus of classicism and romanticism. So much has depended on him; so much depends. But Cunningham is not aloof, and you can see the applause reach him and delight him as he takes his place, reaching for the free hand of the last dancer in the lineup. Though their order across the stage varies from work to work, the dancers always bow together. For as you have seen in the theater, theirs is a common enterprise that is uncommon indeed: They are the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Benchmarks

2000s

The company's new work is characterized by an increasingly refined use by Cunningham of "the dance computer." Plans are made for international and national touring during 2002-2003, celebrating the company's fiftieth anniversary.

1990s

The company first appears in choreography Cunningham devises using the computer program Life Forms. In August 1992, John Cage, the company's musical director, dies. The company and Cunningham work on completing Enter (1992) for a Paris season in the fall of 1992. In 1994, the company premieres Cunningham's landmark ninety-minute work in-the-round called Ocean.

1980s

The company appears in Channels/Inserts (1981), a filmdance with Charles Atlas; also with Atlas in Coast Zone (1983). With Elliot Caplan, Cunningham makes Points in Space (1986), a videodance co-produced by the BBC. (Stage versions of these dances followed.)

1970s

The company moves to "Westbeth" (studio and office space in the eponymous building at the corner of Bethune and West Streets in lower Manhattan), which is still home to the company and school. Cunningham appears in both film and video dances in addition to live performance.

1960s

The company makes its first dance for television and undertakes a world tour. In Vienna, the dancers perform their first "Event," a format Cunningham devises in response to the demands of an unconventional performance space.

1950s

Merce Cunningham Dance Company is formed and gives its first public performance in March 1953 in Urbana, Illinois. Cunningham begins to use chance operations as a choreographic device.

1940s

Cunningham begins to devise his own technique. He and Cage begin to separate music and dance. Cunningham gives his first concerts.

1930s

Cunningham studies dance with Maude M. Barrett. He attends the Cornish School in Seattle, initially as a theater student, where he studies dance with Bonnie Bird and meets composer John Cage, his life companion. At Mills College, he meets Martha Graham. He moves to New York in 1939 and joins Graham's company.

1919

Mercer Cunningham is born in Centralia, Washington, on April 16.

Learn More

www.merce.org (archives, film and video, dancers and musicians, repertoire, etc.)

Merce Cunningham, Fifty Years by David Vaughan. New York, NY: Aperture. 1999. 320 pages, paper, illustrated. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8938-1863-1.

Merce Cunningham, Dancing in Space and Time edited by Richard Kostelanetz and Jack Anderson. New York and Cambridge: Da Capo Press. 1998. 280 pages, paper. $17.95. ISBN: 0-3068-0877-3.

The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde by Calvin Tomkins. New York, NY: Penguin USA. 1976. Paper, 320 pages. $15.00. ISBN: 0-1400-4313-6.

Changes: Notes on Choreography by Merce Cunningham New York, NY: Something Else Press, 1968. Out of print.

Merce Cunningham ed. by James Klosty. New York, NY: Proscenium Publishers. 1975. Out of print.

Dance Perspectives Volume 34, Summer 1968. Article on Cunningham by Carolyn Brown.

Nancy Dalva is the staff writer for 2wice magazine and a longtime contributor to Dance Magazine.