Merce among the children: fourth graders from P.S. 234 talk about performing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

While Merce Cunningham gives notes to his dancers after the first run-through of the day's rehearsal, I huddle with the eleven fourth-graders who will perform tonight [December 18, 2002] part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Event in the lobby of American Express headquarters, adjacent to Ground Zero in New York. It is the location of "Rewarding Lives," an exhibit of portraits of extraordinary people including Cunningham, famed photographer Annie Leibovitz. The kids are vocal and articulate. I ask if they know how famous Merce Cunningham is. "I'd never heard of him before last year," volunteers Stella. "And when I tell everyone I'm in the show for a couple of minutes, they're like, `He's really famous!'"

At the start of the Event, the children enter with the dancers, all dressed in street clothes: The dancers' outfits are accented with colors and patterns; the kids wear their own all-black clothing. They parade slowly through a series of "pods" made of nylon mesh stretched over bent metal pipes, which house the photos, stopping every few steps to do ten-second, frozen poses. Some children imitate the dancers' wide lunges and angular body shapes; the more adventurous do layouts, arabesques, crouches, and even a shoulder stand. Then the youngsters sit on benches at the perimeter and draw on clipboards while the forty-five-minute collage of Cunningham repertoire proceeds. The audience watches from the balcony above or alongside the dancing on the exhibit floor.

The kids stifle yawns as they draw wonderful stick figures of the dancers' movement with clarifying annotations: "Leg behind." "Jump up and down." "Head spinning." Most fill both sides of the page.

Nine-year-old Nicholas tells me that he, Chris, and Huei are best friends. Nicholas and Chris are among the first in the procession and thus get to do all the poses. "When you're sitting down on the bench," Nicholas says, "you just feel like you want to get up and move around and dance, `cause when you pose you're just standing still, and we only have one minute on the stage." Actually, it's more like three of four for Nicholas, since he enters early, but for the last in line it's only one pose. When I ask the three boys it they want to be dancers, they are emphatic: "Yes!"

It all started when Patricia Lent, a Cunningham dancer from 1984 to 1993, now an elementary school teacher at P.S. 234 in lower Manhattan, took her third-grade class to the Cunningham studio for some recreation after they'd been displaced from their school by the events of 9/11. Crammed with her class into a replacement school, one day Lent called to see if her twenty-four students could escape to the spacious Cunningham studio to watch a rehearsal.

The kids were enthralled," said Lent, "They, weren't puzzled by the work; it didn't bother them that there was no music. Everything the dancers did was just what it was. At a certain point there was a break, and the kids stood up and just raced into the space. It was a free-for-all."

"They just ran amok. It was a tumult!" recalled Cunningham. "And they're little, you know, so they were very close to the floor, and they could get down and up in the most marvelous ways. It was a joy!"

"The Cunningham people and I were delighted with how it went," Lent continued. "The children wrote about the experience, and I sent their letters to the studio. [The children liked] all the things that you've always had to defend about Merce's work: that it doesn't have a story; it doesn't necessarily mean anything [literal]; that different people [prefer] different sections [of the dances].... And they loved it when Merce was trying to fix problems; that happens to them all the time. They said, `It's like when we spell words wrong, and we have to get them right.'"

Subsequently, Lent got a call from the company with an invitation for the children to attend the performance at the Leibovitz exhibit. No one's sure who decided that the children could participate rather than just watch. "It was like so many things with Merce," said Lent. "There are these situations and a series of coincidences that work."

Twelve said yes (some were away for winter break and one later dropped out), with the agreement that they'd be available for every rehearsal. "Actually there weren't many--just one at the studio and one at the space on the day [of the first show]," said Lent.

Little Caroline tells me, "When Trish first said, `You're going to be part of the dance,' I thought, `I'm gonna be in a show and dance and stuff!' I was really disappointed when I found out I only get to pose three times."

Abby seconds, "It would be fun if we got to dance through the entire show, and also, when you run out of paper, you just have to sit there."

"Or if your pencil breaks, you just have to pretend to draw," adds Chris.

But the consensus is that they're pleased they get to make up their own poses, and, reasons Julia, "At least we get to be in the show at all, instead of just watching it."

Are there plans to include youngsters in future company activities? "That would depend on Patricia [Lent]. I don't object," mused Cunningham, who hadn't worked with children before. "I like it very much when they come [to watch at the studio]. It's a kind of adventure for them that is both formal and informal, because it's not like a regular theater, and it's not like a regular school."

Said Lent, "It was the best field trip I ever planned!"

Gus Solomons jr is artistic director of PARADIGM: Carmen de Lavallade, Gus Solomons jr, and Dudley Williams in concert. He teaches at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts and is a former member of the Cunningham company.