美国国家公共电台 NPR 100 Dances For 100 Years Of Merce Cunningham

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

This week was the centennial of Merce Cunningham's birth. The late choreographer¹'s revolutionary dance legacy² was commemorated³ Tuesday with special performances in London, New York and Los Angeles called "Night Of 100 Solos." Jeff Lunden went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to find out more.

JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE⁴: The studio was almost eerily⁵ silent, save for the sound of dancers walking, running and jumping as 25 performers rehearsed the program. They were ballet dancers, modern dancers, hip-hop dancers, most of whom had never performed Cunningham's rigorous, idiosyncratic choreography in public. After the run-through, Patricia Lent, who staged the Brooklyn performance, gave notes to the dancers.

PATRICIA LENT: So yeah - sooner - sooner - like, as the leg is coming in...

LUNDEN: Lent danced with Merce Cunningham for ten years. "Night Of 100 Solos" was her idea.

LENT: The idea of 100 for the centennial - and the solos come from all the different decades of Merce's work. So the earliest one we have is from the early '50s. And the latest one we have is from his last dance in 2009.

LUNDEN: Cunningham had a unique vision, beginning with his relationship to music. He did the choreography without it, then brought all the production elements - music, costumes and scenery - together at the performance. Ken⁶ Tabachnick, who runs the Cunningham Trust, says it was an idea the choreographer worked on with composer John Cage, who was Cunningham's most frequent collaborator⁷, as well as his life partner.

KEN TABACHNICK: They developed a structure that people refer to as common time, where the different elements would be created discreetly⁸ and individually apart from each other and only come together in the common time of the performance.

KEITH SABADO: Cunningham technique has its own music. You just have to find it, and then you have to put your own body into it.

LUNDEN: Keith Sabado has danced with Mark Morris and Lucinda Childs. So he normally matches steps to music. He was one of the dancers selected for the Brooklyn show.

SABADO: There's a lot of stillness and an explosion, lots of juxtaposed, silent moments and then moments where they're just crazy, crazy, crazy. But also, you can see when you watch the work that the body parts are all correlated to each other. But they may be doing very different things.

LUNDEN: Body parts doing different things at the same time are another essential aspect of Cunningham's technique, says Ken Tabachnick.

TABACHNICK: Cunningham separated the individual limbs and made them independent participants in the movement and technique. So the hands, oftentimes, or the arms were completely separate in terms of their movement from what the legs were doing or the lower half the body was doing.

LUNDEN: Which can be really challenging for dancers who aren't used to it. Sara Mearns is a principal for the New York City Ballet.

SARA MEARNS: It's finding the strength between your legs and your back together because, when you land, you sometimes have to land and stay there in a plie, in an arabesque⁹ for, like, eight counts. And I don't have to do that in ballet.

LUNDEN: Mearns says she's been fascinated by the way Patricia Lent has staged the event with sometimes two, three, five dancers doing different solos at once.

MEARNS: If someone's, like, moving so slow, it makes the other person solo moving fast look even faster.

LUNDEN: The unexpected connections and dialogue between the dances and the other elements came clear at the performance in Brooklyn.

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LUNDEN: The 25 dancers in solid-colored unitards and pantsuits performed their solos with newly composed music before not only a sold-out house but audiences watching the performance live online. Dancer Keith Sabado says he's been grateful to be part of the Cunningham centennial tribute.

SABADO: I think of him as a father figure in modern dance terms. And I really appreciate that I'm getting this opportunity to commune with him, to converse¹⁰ with him again.

LUNDEN: And viewers can commune with Merce Cunningham by watching videos of the Brooklyn, London and LA performances at mercecunningham.org. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in Brooklyn.

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