Nearly Ninety

Palo Alto, November 2, 2011–

Extraordinarily rewarding, finally moving performance here last night of Merce Cunningham's Nearly Ninety2, the final work of the American choreographer whose career, I think, puts him in the category of Picasso, Joyce, Einstein, and his own partner John Cage among the greatest minds of his century.

Cunningham died, at ninety, a few months after the premiere of this work, two years ago; and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has been making a final memorial tour in the intervening time. (The curtain comes down permanently on the company on December 31, 2011.) The farewell tour has been unique among recent MCDC tours for its revival – "reconstruction" is their preferred and, in fact, more accurate word – of pieces from the repertory, going back to the 1950s. I think last night's performance gained from this retrospection. It's always hard to tell which of many factors is prominent in determining one's understanding, during the event, of as complex an observation of a work like Nearly Ninety2 , of course: scored for thirteen dancers, each of whom is a soloist at one time or another, its 24 sections unfold in eighty minutes, without an intermission, in a spellbinding sequence of solos, duets, quartets, and ensembles, fleetingly fast and glacially slow by unexpected turns, in a series of contemplations, I would guess, of the four elements; for this is an elemental ballet, going to the essence of what it is "about": the body in motion, which of course includes the body at rest.

This is, also of course, a matter of life and death. And, not to be recursive, that makes retrospection, especially in the contemplation of this great body of work, now closed in one very important sense, an inescapable component of responding, as an onlooker, to this performance – as it happened, the final performance by MCDC of Merce's final work, though a number of performances of other pieces remain to be given in the next two months.

I recently read Carolyn Brown's big, important, and rewarding memoir Chance and Circumstance (as felicitous a piece of writing as its intelligent title suggests), and that reading, so informative about Merce and John (and Rauschenberg and others) and about the early years of the Company, must be influential as well in responding to last night's performance. I thought I saw Merce himself, in flashes, in Raschaun Mitchell's strong, stately, athletic, intelligent performances, and Carolyn Brown in those of Andrea Weber, sober, graceful, lithe, and equally intelligent.

Brown writes often, both directly and allusively, about the possible role of "meaning" in Merce's work. (These contemplations, usually either foolish or forbidden in other commentators, are among the historically significant aspects of her book.) A choreographer cannot evade consideration of the place of sex – I refuse the word "gender" – in setting his work on his dancers, and a big part of the impact of Merce's choreography, not to mention the dancers' realization of it, has to be the expression of that consideration. Sex and Life and Death, motion and stillness: big matters, to be returned to, the fates willing, in forthcoming visits here.

Merce Cunningham

Berkeley, March 26—

Do not ask the following to be a true account of the facts concerning tonight's performance of Nearly Ninety, by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, at Zellerbach Hall, in Berkeley.

[Next day: well, actually, it doesn't seem that inaccurate at all.)

It begins on a bare stage, black back wall, loud electronic drone, then the octave, then a fifth, repeated, repeated. Dancers enter as they do in Merce Cunningham's choreography, purposefully, simply, with strength, mostly by ones. Skin tights, painted in whites and blacks. Strong graceful dancers.

Ninety minutes of solos, duets, trios, double duets, quartets, quintets, octets. Absolutely no "expression," "narrative," "meaning." Motion and stillness. Repeated gestures, steps, "routines": the skipping onto the scene, occasional back-kicks with one foot. The one-foot poise, arms extended, slowly turning. The crawls. The jumps.

Now and then, with great eloquence, two or three seated figures, looking at one another or not.

The backdrop surprisingly rising a foot to display a strip of bright orange light at the floor, side to side. Or rising, slowly or not; the light teal, or grey, or orange, or straw-gold-yellow. Or going black again.

Toward the end, recurring, a horizontal stripe, at the center a much brighter almost-square, on either side the stripe tending away in a dimmer light. I thought of Redon: this optical device was the eye of a god, or perhaps it was Merce watching his creation from beyond.

The choreography always absorbing, graceful, strong, accurate, true. Now and then a grouping recalls a passage in a Franz Kline painting, or a soloist suddenly freezes in an attitude recalling a detail in a Tanguy painting. Merce's work is so intelligent, so informed, so generous, so non-manipulative, that one's free, or rather almost impelled, to read in whatever experiences of one's own come first to mind — as long as there's no one-dimensional emotion, or expression, or narrative.

I watch this Nearly Ninety, and think of the previous big piece of his, Oceans. Same huge cosmic scale, again peopled, teeming, with detail and life. Oceans was perhaps meant to suggest the life-organisms that began in those teeming seas, then evolved to crawl out onto the mud, the sands, into the forests, into the air.

Nearly Ninety, then, suggests the Cosmos; the life organisms moving, skipping, quietly turning, hastily rushing through it range from the Brownian motion of atoms to the insanely wheeling galaxies of the Cosmos. Merce was nearly ninety years old when he made it; it runs nearly ninety minutes long. It made me think of B**th*v*n's greatest last pieces, the Bagatelles Op. 126. It is sad he's gone [Cunningham I mean], but it is right; the work is here. Irving Kolodin, I think it was, in writing of the Bonn Symphonist, said the artist's role is to experience more intensely than we can, and express that experience more tellingly than we can, for our benefit. Merce Cunningham was a towering master, doing exactly that.