Merce Cunningham Dance Company

I managed to get my hands on the fifteen dollar student tickets for the Friday show of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Royce Hall. The show was amazing and unlikely any other ensemble I’ve seen. Merce Cunningham choreographs the dances using math and has his technical crew produce a soundtrack to accompany the dance independently. Consequently, the music doesn’t match up to the dancing all the time.

In “Way Station” (2001), I noticed that the dancers went to very set positions on the stage, under space-age tents that were colored yellow, green, and blue. The music was very raspy and booming, creating a surreal dance that seemed to take place on the moon. The accompanying soundtrack was entitled Short Waves.

“Fabrications” (1987) was my favorite of the three productions, since it seemed to correlate best to the music. In this show, the lighting also changed frequently, and I thought the dance reached its zenith when the lighting changed to a pale yellow and the dancers moved very slowly, pulling each other from a sitting to standing position.

The final production, “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run” (1965) really lost me. Merce read news stories on stage simultaneously with David Vaughan, which resulted in the stories getting mixed up. Meanwhile, the dancers did various routines behind Merce without any set decorations. I’m sure this sequence had some sort of deeper meaning, but I missed it. I was content with just laughing at the odd word pairings, such as “and so Mrs. Cunningham backed out of the garage and over the flowers…mushrooms!” It was bizarre and virtually impossible to describe, yet very entertaining.

For more information on Merce Cunningham, I recommend reading the Salon interview entitled “I like to make steps” published in 1996.