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Merce Cunningham,
un monstre sacré de la danse du 20e siècle
Un article sur Merce Cunningham, paru
dans le journal anglais The Guardian, alors qu’il
se trouvait en visite à Londres en septembre dernier.
À l’âge vénérable de 87
ans, le célèbre chorégraphe étonne
encore. |
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Chance encounters
Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, Saturday September 16,
2006
He might be 87, but for choreographer Merce Cunningham dance
is as vital as ever. The last work he created with his partner
John Cage, who died in 1992, comes to London next week
Merce Cunningham is sitting in his New York studios, with
soaring views over the Chrysler Building, talking about
the day he calls his "beginning" - April 5 1944,
when he danced the first solo programme he had choreographed
himself, at the age of 24. The music was by the man who
would become his long-term collaborator and life partner,
the late John Cage. Dance critic Edwin Denby likened Cunningham
- a great dancer in his time - to one of the "juvenile
saltimbanques of the early Picasso canvases", whose,
"steps, runs, knee bends and leaps are brilliant in
lightness and speed".
"Oh it's terrible," Cunningham says - and laughs.
"I would like to dance." He really means it. But,
at 87, he is sitting in a wheelchair, his expressive hands
are creased with the marks of age, and his body - once so
erect and graceful - seems to have folded in on itself.
However, his hair still falls in exotic curls, his eyes
are steady, and his gentle voice is clear and sure. Each
day, after rising and making little pencil drawings of animals
("a wonderful way of getting out of your own head,
nothing to do with art"), he takes rehearsals at his
company's studio in New York - for over half a century perhaps
the most important modern dance company in the world.
Three simple but revolutionary ideas helped forge Cunningham's
methods: first, that dance need not be made "to"
the music, but could have a separate existence; second,
that dance need not signify or refer to anything else, but
could simply "be itself"; third, Cunningham along
with Cage pioneered the use of chance procedures in making
work - the I Ching (the ancient Chinese book of divination),
or, for example, throws of the dice, which might be used
to determine the sequence of a set of movements.
Recalling the evening that he and Cage devised their programme,
he says: "I was still with the Martha Graham company
and I had made solos previous to that. I did six solos and
he [Cage] did some music. We had evolved this system of
working which was called, for lack of a better phrase, a
rhythmic structure. Say, for example, we decided a dance
was going to be three minutes long, then we'd divide it
into 10. But I made the dance not to what he was going to
do, but to the structure. I found it so difficult because
I had to depend upon myself, first of all, rather than on
music. At one point when we got together, I did something
I thought was a very strong movement. And there was no sound
at all, but right after it came this sound. And that was
a small revelation - I remember it very clearly."
Though Cunningham talks of the separation of music and dance
as a "liberation", as something that brings "equality",
you sense it is less a matter of ideology than a way of
opening up possibilities - of the unintended but revelatory
effect, for example, of a strong movement happening in complete
silence, rather than on a musical climax, as on that night
in 1944. The rejection of narrative is similar: not so much
part of the general 20th-century move towards abstraction,
but about forcing dance on to its own resources. In any
case, he says: "I don't think of dance as being abstract,
I think of dance as being movement. Any kind of movement."
The use of chance procedures, again, seems more about imagining
the unimaginable than any religious or metaphysical preoccupation.
"Chance procedures open up simple movements, things
that one always does a certain way out of habit, even though
there are countless ways to do it," says Cunningham.
"It's like in nature: you are never going to see everything;
there's always something else. I believe that very much
about movement - there are limits to the human frame, two
feet and so forth, but the variations are endless, if you
just find a way to see them.
"If you say you are going to do a run and a jump and
a fall, that would seem logical, wouldn't it? But if it
comes out as fall, run, jump, you have to figure out a way.
And you can say, 'that's not possible'. But my feeling has
always been that even if it wasn't possible, something else
always came up that I hadn't thought of. That's the basis
for using the chance procedure. It makes you think again
about the body, and about movement."
More important, perhaps, than the ideas that underpin the
choreography is a pleasure in human grace and agility, in
wit and inventiveness, in shapes and formal abstractions,
though an art that uses the body as its material is barely
abstract. One has the sense of a deep humanity, though of
a quieter sort from that which exists in, say, Pina Bausch's
highly charged human dramas and histrionic explorations
of sexuality.
Mercier Philip Cunningham was born on April 16 1919 in Centralia,
Washington State, the son of a lawyer. He learnt dance from
Mrs Mary Barrett, who had worked in vaudeville, and taught
tap-dancing and some exhibition ballroom dancing. She had,
Cunningham wrote in 1955, "a devotion to dancing as
an instantaneous and agreeable act of life. All my subsequent
involvements with dancers who were concerned with dance
as a conveyer of social message or to be used as a testing
ground for psychological types have not succeeded in destroying
that feeling Mrs Barrett gave me - that dance is most concerned
with each single instant as it comes along, and its life
and vigour and attraction lie in just that singleness. It
is as accurate and impermanent as breathing."
In 1937 he went to the Cornish School (now Cornish College
of the Arts) in Seattle - an extremely creative formative
education, taking in everything from Stanislavsky to ancient
Chinese ceramics. It also provided the key meeting of his
life: John Cage, then married, was employed at the school
as accompanist and composition teacher.
At summer school in 1939 Cunningham was spotted by Martha
Graham, the doyenne of modern dance, and she immediately
asked him to come to New York to dance in her company. Though
much of Cunningham's later work as a choreographer was an
active rejection of Graham, he shone as one of her main
dancers. "She had an extra-ordinary sense of theatre,"
Cunningham says of Graham, "she was astonishing to
watch." He talks of her interest in modern art (though
not of contemporary music). Cunningham would later commission
designs from the greatest American artists of the 20th century,
from Johns and Rauschenberg to Warhol. The artists would
also work in isolation, so that the elements of movement,
music and design would come together only at the last moment,
their combined effects entirely unpremeditated - in a way,
another chance procedure.
He met Cage again, and they eventually became partners.
They were always discreet about their relationship. "I
do the cooking and Merce does the dishes," Cage once
said when pressed for details. Cunningham said in 2000:
"I don't think I was guarded about my personal life.
It's quite true that I didn't speak about it very much,
but I didn't see any reason to speak about it. John and
I were together. We did our work together. We travelled
together. What more is there to say?"
When Cage died in 1992, Cunningham went back to work the
following day. Ocean, in a sense the couple's last collaboration
- conceived together, but realised only after Cage's death
- is the piece that he is bringing to London's Roundhouse
next week. Premiered in 1994 with a score by David Tudor,
another of Cunningham's long-standing composers, the work
exists in a series of concentric circles: dancers in the
centre, audience around them, musicians around them in turn.
"I came out with a phrase, 'I wanted to make a circle',"
says Cunningham. "I mapped out the circle in the studio,
and I got out of it and thought, which way do I face? So
I went back again, using chance operations to decide. But
the dancers change the way they face so often that there
is no 'front'. It makes something that people can see in
their own way."
The city of New York is inextricably linked to Cunningham's
art. There has always been the stimulating busyness of it,
the "sense of art in the city". (The day before
we meet, Cunningham was admiring Douglas Gordon's "way
of thinking about time" at the Museum of Modern Art.)
Recalling his early experiences in the city, he says: "I
was at the Graham School downtown, and I used to go to an
early class at the School of American Ballet, which was
at 59th Street and Madison. So from there I could walk to
57th Street and to all the art galleries, and you could
go to the MoMA, and see an old movie and then go downtown
and have a class. There was such a multiplicity of possibilities
if you just looked around, if you didn't get stuck."
One thing that always fascinated him was just watching people
in the street, particularly in New York. "I saw somebody
once at a street corner waiting for the light so he could
cross, and he kept shuffling his feet to decide which foot
he was going to step out on. Finally he stepped on his right
foot. I began to watch people: 95 per cent of them stepped
off on their right foot; they'd shift their balance to get
there. I practised, and when I went out walking used my
left, just to give myself that experience.
"One could have worked in San Francisco, as a number
of dancers did. But here in New York you could turn a corner
and see something you hadn't ever thought about before.
That fascinated me - that no matter how much I had gone
a certain way, if I just took another route I could see
or experience something new."
Source :
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1873526,00.html
Retourner
au sommaire du numéro d'octobre 2006
© i-mouvance est édité
par le Regroupement québécois de la danse.
Les articles signés expriment l'opinion de leurs
auteurs et pas nécessairement celle du RQD.
Pour toute information : info@quebecdanse.org
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