MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY EISENHOWER THEATER, THE KENNEDY CENTER WASHINGTON, D.C. APRIL 6-8, 2000

Interscape (2000), which is brand new, reaffirms some of modernism's basic tenets: Leave structure exposed, let materials equal meaning, limit the scope, but within that box, be bold! It is a simply magnificent work.

The first thing seen, the black and white of Robert Rauschenberg's front drop, is a set of adjacent images (the Parthenon, a duck, a statue of a horse rearing up, to name a few). Light (plotted by Aaron Copp) dawns behind this transparent drop to show figures of dancers in dull practice clothing warming up on stage. Music for a single cello (the late John Cage's [One.sup.8] from 1991) begins to explore string sonorities, and the dancers exit.

When the front drop is hoisted, Rauschenberg's media images reappear on the backdrop in color. Here they seem like icons on a huge computer screen, except they are not dead-set in neat rows but a bit jumbled, as if just born. Stepping into this setting, Merce Cunningham's dancers now wear colorful T-shirts and tights. They move deliberately and clearly, giving several aspects of balletic motion their due: line and volume, rise and fall, speed and slowing. The slowing becomes particularly prominent in this piece. At times it is almost posing, so protracted are shifts of weight and turns of shape. But slowing becomes sudden stopping too, especially late in the work when a collision is resolved by a man catching and holding his partner in an uplift, or when a solo woman drops to the floor.

With a cast of fourteen, there are ensembles, solos and combinations of dancers numerically in-between. Cunningham's focus, though, is on groups of twos and threes. Sometimes contact within a duad or triad is minimal, but there are three true duets and several trios. The duet couples are traditionally male-female and constant, whereas the dancers in threesomes keep being replaced regardless of their sex. For Cunningham, who has become used to pre-choreographing his pieces on a computer program's ungendered geometric figures, do the different dancer combinations mean more than just shapes combining?

Sexuality definitely colors Rauschenberg's thinking. He painted the men's costumes in deep, cool, aquatic green and blue, but the women's were more in petal shades of yellow and rose. During encounters, dancers sometimes alter their task-intent expressions, acknowledging each other with a smile. This is a bit of evidence that Cunningham isn't totally like the balletmaster in Kleist's classic dialogue ("On the Puppet Theater"), preferring marionettes to live dancers because the artifact figures are entirely free of mannerisms. Strong proof is the solo for Daniel Squire, a tallish blond chap on whose T-shirt Rauschenberg imprinted the faces of two clocks. This male variation is a long, incredibly difficult essay on balance, pace, control and poise. It is a statement about craft and beauty, but not in an abstract way. By bringing out Squire's persistence, concentration, care, risk-taking and, at the very end, sense of accomplishment, Cunningham calls on traits that remain human in this computer age or any other.

Funny and accessible, Cunningham and Rauschenberg chatted on stage like a pair of veteran vaudevillians following Interscape's first performance, chuckling at their own tales or deadpan when they were the butt of a joke.

Music other than the cello score, which Loren Kiyoshi Dempster performed with bravura, could accompany Interscape, according to Cunningham. He recommends Cage's 108, which requires 108 instrumentalists, or a cello concerto consisting of [One.sup.8] plus 108. It would take computer-company funding to realize either of these options.

Interscape had none of the impressionism of Summerspace (1958) or the nature imitation of Pond Way (1998), the two Cunningham dances that preceded the premiere. This work's simplicity is consummate.