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 But she is far too feisty to produce an agenda-free historical document.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.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
For the past century, Changhua has existed in Taichung’s shadow. These days, Changhua City has a population of 223,000, compared to well over two million for the urban core of Taichung. For most of the 1684-1895 period, when Taiwan belonged to the Qing Empire, the position was reversed. Changhua County covered much of what’s now Taichung and even part of modern-day Miaoli County. This prominence is why the county seat has one of Taiwan’s most impressive Confucius temples (founded in 1726) and appeals strongly to history enthusiasts. This article looks at a trio of shrines in Changhua City that few sightseers visit.
RSS