Print

Mail

wiki links

Together they made modern dance modern

By Claudia la Rocco
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Sunday, Apr 29, 2007, Page 19

Change and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham By Carolyn Brown 645 pages Alfred A. Knopf

In the fall of 2003 a boisterous crowd filled the Brooklyn Academy of Music as the Merce Cunningham Dance Company concluded its 50th anniversary season.

Onstage Cunningham presided over several rolls of dice to determine the order of music, decor, costumes and lighting for the premiere of Split Sides, which would prove to be marvelous. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was on hand, as were the Cunningham collaborators Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and the former company dancer Carolyn Brown.

The ceremony felt ritualistic — nostalgic, even — with viewers primed for the grand theatricality of it all. You could imagine the spirit of John Cage, Cunningham's longtime partner, hovering gleefully over the proceedings.

Cunningham's methods have not always seemed so cuddly. Half a century ago his modern, experimental aesthetic, in which movement is meant to speak for itself, was more likely to provoke catcalls and cold shoulders from audiences, critics and choreographers ill-prepared to deal with his art and ideas. (The world is still grappling with the philosophies and possibilities presented by Cunningham, Cage and their peers.) Brown, an original and celebrated company member who stayed for 20 years, was there to witness it all. And now, finally, her memoir has arrived. It was only a decade more in the making than her tenure with Cunningham.

Thankfully the book, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham, doesn't feel labored. Not even close. Brown has relied heavily on diary entries and letters written during her time with the company, and these vivid words anchor the book's rambling vitality. She rockets from the heady excitements of New York's burgeoning art scene in the 1950s to the fraught relationships between the modern "Biggies" (including Martha Graham, Jose Limon and Doris Humphrey) at the American Dance Festival to tour descriptions that suggest she would make a fine travel writer, though one prone to moments of outrageous romanticism. (In India, during the company's 1964 world tour, she even inquires about adopting a "curly-haired beggar child.")

If Brown were interested only in offering detail-rich snapshots of the company's first two decades, her memoir would certainly be an entertaining read, as well as an invaluable resource for scholars. (This is particularly true with regard to Cunningham, about whom there is not a particularly extensive literature.) But she is far too feisty to produce an agenda-free historical document. As she writes in the preface, her memoir is just one telling of this story, and "surely there are as many other versions as there were people involved — plus that impossible, truly objective one." After this charmingly disingenuous disclaimer, she turns to setting the record straight.

Nowhere is she more fervent than in her feeling that Cunningham's work is often clumsily understood, aided by his own obfuscations. "I'll state once again," she writes, "as I intend to do throughout this book, that the meaning of and in Merce's dances was never merely the steps, and that even if he and John Cage intended them to be (and I am convinced Merce did not), it's impossible for human bodies placed together in time and space not to reek with secret and not-so-secret meaning."

Later she describes telling Cunningham, waiting in the wings before a performance, that she had lost the "quality" of Scramble, so long had it been since they danced it. He responded, "There is no quality to lose." Thirty years later she tartly counters, "Well, I beg to differ."

Her physical knowledge of Cunningham's work gives her assertions a distinct authority, and her descriptions of the choreography are fascinating. The same cannot be said for everything here; once in awhile — say, after the umpteenth description of lost luggage, inadequate theaters and turista traumas — you wish for a bit more economy of detail. But how to decide what should go? Most pages contain absolute gems, like this description of a 1965 performance in New York, excerpted from Brown's journal:

"State Theater programs were an absolute gas! That is, I had a glorious time!!! God, what intoxication it is to perform in a theater like that. The space is so marvelously HUGE, it makes me giddy with delight."

"When it was over," she continues, "and we took curtain calls, I felt like some member of a tiny minority group that the whole world hated and was booing. We ran on stage — the six of us — as though electrified with strength, defiance, courage, and belief in what we were doing ... and the people shrieked, booed and hissed. And other people cheered and bravoed."

Brown's romantic relationships are documented, including her marriage to the composer Earle Brown, but the true love story here is an artistic one. She fell early and hard for Cunningham's choreography, for the vigor of Rauschenberg's riotously creative contributions and for the holistic art-and-life philosophy embodied most fully by Cage. Like any true love affair between complex, often difficult people, it produced deeply felt, wildly varying emotions. No matter the length, a book can offer only glimpses of such relationships. But what glimpses.
This story has been viewed 1092 times.