Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Bam Opera House, October 14-19, 1997.

BAM OPERA HOUSE OCTOBER 14-19, 1997

Calling the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival "Cunningham, Merce: Forward & Reverse" made a kind of sense. The engagement included three dances new to New York City and one altogether new, as well as extended bits from no fewer than nine pieces in his retired repertory.

These last ranged from something called The Run (1952) to Points in Space (1986), and included a cryptic segment from the legendary Winterbranch (1964). All manner of swell decor was, as it were, got down from the attic for these "BAMevents," including a couple of Rauschenbergs and a marvelous Johns (apres Duchamp), but the music was newly produced at each performance.

Generalizing from the revivals of pieces I already knew well, I suspect that all of these excerpts were versions of the originals, quite valid and wonderful in their own way, if different in effect from the originals themselves. The most beautiful duet of the entire season came from Un jour ou deux ("A Day or Two," 1973), with a thrillingly attentive, dark-haired Thomas Cal partnering the gorgeousy blonde Jeannie Steele, whose bright, angelic promise has now bloomed into a fastidious yet decadent elegance.

Caley also romped through the season's most buoyant solo, some twenty-five minutes into the spacious and felicitous work called--after both the computer operating system and the actual things themselves--Windows (1995) Here you can feel the choreographer clicking and dragging his mouse as he sizes the dancers and their space, moving them around, making them crouch to fit a new window, and splitting the stage as he might a computer screen. You also notice, at the some time, that you seem to be peering in at any number of different scenes, all interesting. But Caley's solo, when he comes bounding down the stage and is briefly joined by Foofwa d'Imobilite (which is what that great dancer Frederic Gafner now insists on calling himself) in a duet of pure leaping joy, is a moment purely theatrical.

In Paris, where the work premiered, the lighting was much brighter, and the passage was reminiscent of Cunningham's buoyant Summerspace. Even on a dimmer stage, the open feeling remained, as did the notion that one could see Windows every night and, merely by moving a bit to the left or the right, see something difFerent.

Installations (1996) is another affair in grey, but here the look of the work, designed by Elliot Caplan, is of a soigne, nineties Rainforest.(Imagine Andy Warhol's silver pillows transformed into silver video monitors and his ripped leotards streamlined and spiffed up, yet still rent.) Like Rainforest, Installations has the feel of a group portrait, whether anthropological or terpsichorean. Several times throughout this mysterious and satisfying piece, Cunningham posed the dancers as statues, and moved them almost robotically, like the toys in The Nutcracker or Coppelia warming to life. At the end, seven men lift seven women, each with an arm upraised like a mannequin. Clearly it not the partners who could bring them to life, but the choreographer, who, having relegated himself at last to the wings, still reveals his magisterial hand

Nonetheless, at age 78 this utterly distinguished master, an artist Apollonian to the bone, got all tangled up in couture at its most preposterous in the new Scenario. What drove Cunningham to his aesthetically ill-advised marriage of convenience with the Japanese-born Parisian couturiere Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons? Her dowry included not only an enviable ability to generate lots of glossy publicity from New York's powerful fashionistas, but also designs from her unsalable and ridiculous spring 1997 women's line, which the dancers gamely donned without regard to gender.

In this misalliance, Cunningham emerged as a curiously chaste bride-groom. He didn't didn't exactly ignore the stretchy costumes, which were repeated in three color schemes (first some lively dishtowel patterns, then scarlet and black). Maybe he couldn't, given their strange fun-house mirror bulges and bumps and hunchbacks and hunchfronts; but he didn't have much fun with them either. (Only once, when Steele was bundled up in her dress and thrown onstage like a parcel, did Cunningham venture an ironic and amusing gesture.) Unlike, for instance, the excerpt from Winterbranch, in which there was a fantastic unity of impression, Scenario was neither here nor there, and hence dispiriting.

Quite possibly there is a lovely dance underneath the Kawakubo, but it will take a determined observer to find it. On its surface Scenario is exactly that--superficial, arty in a Nikki de Saint-Phalle kind of way. Of the divine Cunningham troupers, their gorgeous limbs sticking out of their lumpen garments, only Cheryl Therrien, a sphinx-like dancer given to performing through the body rather than merely with it, was transcendently focused, particularly in a brief swimming port de bras of magical allure. But with composer Takehisa Kosugi waxing loud and loony in the pit, and the bare white stage and half the house flooded in harsh fluorescent light (decor courtesy of Kawakubo, and said to resemble her boutiques), Scenario is generally disconcerting and grating, to little effect and for no reason that I could see. In contrast, the randomness and patched together look of Rondo (1996), also a New York premiere, had a certain internal logic. It looked like one of those dances, like Cargo X, that Cunningham diddles with on the way to making something grander.

Mine is not the only opinion, however. At the conclusion of the opening-night performance, after an affectionate ovation, Cunningham's audience actually argued their way up the aisles, out the doors and into the night. Some found Scenario touching, seeing a metaphor: the dancing spirit trapped within the clumsy body. Others sought art-historical precedents, and, Cunningham being Cunningham--is there a dance of his without an arche-type, a rune, a glyph, a pictogram?--found them. At any rate, you've got to hand it to him: Some fifty years into the game, Cunningham, Merce is still stirring up controversy.