Merce Gaining Momentum.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company New York State Theater New York, New York July 24-27, 2002

It's hard to imagine a better way to celebrate the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's fiftieth anniversary than the retrospective season presented by the Lincoln Center Festival 2002 at the New York State Theater. With two programs and four meticulously revived and splendidly danced works, "50 Years of Forward Motion" disclosed the richness of Cunningham's imagination and the classic beauty of his finest dances.

The earliest, Suite for Five (1956-1958), to a score by John Cage, is in the choreographer's purist vein--spare, sculptural, with a core of meditative stillness. Like most of his dances, it is cool and abstract, with tantalizing hints--in a sudden cross, an unexpected shoulder lift, the sculpting of two bodies into something resembling a caress--of banked passion, buried memories, and sensuous ritual. There are no extras, no frills. As restaged by Cunningham and former principal dancer Carolyn Brown, everything is clean, clear, and simple--a declaration of the choreographer's artistic faith.

Pictures (1984), choreographed nearly thirty years later and revived by dancer Robert Swinston, has a similar purity, and the same pools of Zen-like stillness. But the choreography is richer and more fluent than in the earlier work, with a greater sense of composed space, intensified by the use of silhouette and the glowing whiteness of the cyc. (The lighting and decor are by Mark Lancaster; the score by David Behrman.) In this luminous space the trios and quartets take on a mythic quality, as do the slow, turning poses from yoga, the long, sustained balances, the walks on demipointe, the sudden, hovering jumps.

Fabrications (1987), from the same decade, has moments of wistful tenderness, 1940s-style dresses (by Dove Bradshaw), snippets of old social dances in the choreography, and old pop songs in the score (by Emanuel Dimas De Melo Pimenta), and half-remembered stories of young romance. It also boasts a riveting performance by Holley Farmer, who combines lightness and flexibility with rocklike aplomb. Sensitively restaged by Patricia Lent, Fabrications reveals a choreographer attuned to the claims of the human heart.

How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1965), by contrast, recalls the playfulness and energy of the '60s. Revived by Cunningham, Brown, and Swinston, the work is as much theater as dance piece, with a "score" by John Cage that was read aloud by Cunningham and the company's archivist, David Vaughan. Full of in-jokes, puns, and other genial absurdities, Cage's "stories" can easily distract the eye. For Cage and Cunningham this may be fine, but it's a shame to ignore the aerobic doings onstage, the sprinting and springing of the terrific dancers, and the huge wheeling circle that brings the piece to an exciting end.

Compared to the revivals, the new Loose Time (2002) was a disappointment. Christian Wolff's score was spare and unobtrusive, and the piece extremely well danced. However, much of the movement seemed arbitrary, and one did not sense, as in the earlier works, an inner rhythm or the choreographer's signature shapes crystallizing into mind-haunting images.

Completing each program were Melange, a "videodance" by filmmaker Charles Atlas featuring most of the company's dancers, and a slide overview of the company's history narrated by the choreographer.