Merce Cunningham, Futuristic Dance Marvel, Dies

The Cunningham Dance Foundation announced the death of the revolutionary American choreographer. He died Sunday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.
He made people rethink the essence of dance and choreography. Mr. Cunningham had the ability to pose questions making a ponderous spectacle of movement, to the very end. Even when it became known that he was fading, Mr. Cunningham was still creating dances in his head.
In his works, independence was central. His dancers were often alone even in duets or ensembles, and music and design would act as environments, sometimes hostile ones. His movement, startling in its mixture of staccato and legato elements, and unusually intense in its use of torso, legs and feet, abounded in non sequiturs.
In his final years, while still known as avant-garde, he was almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest living choreographer. Mr. Cunningham had also been a nonpareil dancer.
International fame came to him before national fame. In London and Paris Mr. Cunningham was widely celebrated as the creator of a new classicism, as one of the most remarkable theater artists of his day. And it was in Europe that he was most acclaimed right through to this decade, with sold-out Cunningham seasons in Paris at the Theatre de la Ville or the Paris Opera House. Yet he was always a creature of New York. He absorbed aspects of ordinary pedestrian movement, the natural world and city life. He re-examined the relationship between dance and its sound accompaniment. Mr. Cunningham, along with Graham and Balanchine, made New York the world capital of choreography. Mr. Cunningham’s most celebrated and revolutionary achievement, shared with the composer John Cage, his collaborator and companion, was to have dance and music created independently of each other. His choreography showed that dance was principally about itself, not music, while often suggesting that it could also be about many other things. Ambiguity and poetry were among Mr. Cunningham’s favorite words when talking about choreography. So was theater. Wit and humor abounded in his work. His conversation was full of laughter and wry anecdotes. Partly because dance was the main subject of his choreography, and partly because he often created dances requiring virtuoso skill, he did more than any other choreographer to demonstrate that dance can be classical while being in most ways far from ballet.
His animal-like qualities of grace and intensity were as remarkable as his jump. His dance vocabulary owed much too both Graham modern dance, especially its use of the back, and to ballet, mainly its use of the legs and feet. Much of Mr. Cunningham’s wit arose out of his concentration on pure form. An unpredictable change of rhythm or direction, a brisk figure of nifty footwork could provoke the same smiles and laughter as the jokes in a Haydn symphony.
Mr. Cunningham was a man of secrets. Few people knew he had taught himself Russian or had written his own translation of “The Bear” by Chekhov. Mr. Cunningham often spoke and wrote movingly about the nature of dance and would laugh about its maddening impermanence. “You have to love dancing to stick to it,” he once wrote. “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

American Ballet Theater- Romance, Romeo and Juilet

This is the final week in American Ballet Theater's summer season at The Metropolitan Opera House. Marcelo Gomes, a Brazilian principal dancer, is the intoxicating romantic Romeo that has somehow surpassed himself yet again. Mr. Gomes unlocks surpressed qualities in his partners that rids their fears by creating a world so tangible that they forget there is even an audience, they become enveloped the role, the become Juliet.

On Monday night, his partner was Diana Vishneva, one of the company’s worthiest ballerinas. Ms. Vishneva’s Juliet starts out innocently willful and ends up somewhere in the wild. She has a way of wilting, as if air were slowing escaping her body, until, arching her spine and throwing her long arms back with uncalculated force. She looks as though she was gliding threw air, doing so with ease and grace.

Prokofiev’s music soars while emotion builds in a charged glance or a realization, creates windows for individual touches. As Romeo, Mr. Gomes seizes those moments, transforming a flirty swagger into grown-up sensuality. To say this performance was outstanding would be an understatement.

Pina Bausch: The Ultimate Wordly Choreographer

Inspired by her travels, Pina Bausch choreographed gorgeous expressive neo-expressionistic dance. The elusive choreographer said, in an interview last year, that her inspiration came from her many travels. She was known for works showing men and women engaged in endless, often violent, power struggles. Alastair Macaulay wrote that her work could be “strikingly picturesque, always fluid in its comings and goings” as it “switches between episodes of sensual impulsiveness; coy, catwalk like audience-awareness; rushing scenes of harrowing need or anxiety; and diverse aspects of melancholia.”

Because dance does not use words, and much of its spell lies in aspects of contrast, rhythm and coordination, it is only occasionally taken seriously as drama. But, the productions by Ms. Bausch always made an immediate impact as theater. The art of dance will be diminished as a result of her death. No single label will do. Ms. Bausch was not just a green artist protesting the desecration of the environment, though that was a powerful element in her works, or a feminist depicting the opposition between women’s pain and their social conformism, which was evident. Nor was she an expressionist emitting rage at aspects of the socio-political status quo, though the intensity of that feeling was unmistakable. In some of her pieces she seemed to be celebrating the charm of the world, not just mourning its erosion.
And, Ms. Bausch was often very comical. She was a theater poet and the dance world will be monumentally smaller without her. Much thanks to Ms. Bausch, who gave so much of herself to the world of dance. She generously unraveled the inner landscape of her mind onto the stage for the world to witness. She is a true inspiration.