Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Image courtesy of Stanford Lively Arts
If you think you know what dance is, Merce Cunningham’s Nearly 90² breaks so many rules that you might leave with a different opinion. I grew up on old Hollywood musicals, so to me, dance is an expression of emotion, often of romance, and a means of physicalizing music and rhythm. Nearly 90² violates all of these conventions, sometimes to great effect, creating unexpected patterns of movement, and sometimes just serving to alienate the audience.
The dancing is completely divorced from the music, if you can even call the rhythm-less noises music. Cunningham’s process is to choreograph without the music, putting the two components together only in the dress rehearsal. The ‘music’ acts more like background noise to fill the silence than to drive the movement, and it even changes slightly with each performance. John Cage, the composer, is famous for passing off noise as music, sometimes even gunshot noises, but this music was so innocuous, so unobtrusive that it was disappointingly conservative: I had expected to be shocked.
Yet despite the lack of rhythm in the music, the dance still remains somewhat rhythmic. In the first few dances, the movements may be a little robotic, full of controlled perpendicular motions – a bend at the hips, a leg raised at a right angle, arms raised away from the body at an exact right angle – but there’s a similarity in the pacing of these movements among the dancers. I get the sense that the dancers must be counting to something in their heads.
There’s also a strange but striking balance between movements that are in sync and out of sync. Sometimes two or more dancers will make identical movements, but these are staggered by a half-second: short enough that they don’t appear to be intentionally in a sequence, but long enough that, it almost seems like a mistake. It defies what I’ve come to consider good dancing technique: the ability to be precisely in time with others and reproduce the exact same timing every night. Other times, and only once we’re into the middle of the performance, identical movements are executed completely coordinated – what we normally expect from a group of dancers- and the conventionality of it is arresting because it’s so unlike what Nearly 90² has conditioned us to expect: the unexpected.
Since the dancing is unrelated to the music, this creates another sense of disorder: the dancing is not in time with the music, not that there is anything – rhythmically or harmonically – to match. There was only one moment when the music and the movement found harmony, albeit unexpected: the music crescendo-ed and gradually grew higher in pitch, one of the dancers slowly raised her leg up to ninety degrees, and it just so happened to correspond to the change in pitch and volume.
The closer you watch, as the performance progresses, the more order seems to appear among the disorder. There will be a trio where all three dancers twirl around in unison with an arm raised but they will each have slightly different arm movements or different degrees of extension of the arm. The more I became conscious of this order, the more I found its defiance of complete order beautiful and intellectually challenging: it created a richer, more complex landscape of movements to follow. You have to constantly ask yourself “Are the dancers moving as one? If so, how?”, and only rarely expect the answer to be “yes, in every way”.
Although following the movements is aesthetically pleasing and intellectually stimulating, the dancing is not emotionally involving, making it difficult to care what happens next or how. The dancers’ faces are always obscured by shadows, making it impossible for their facial expressions to guide our emotions, either by mimicking or contradicting their movements for dramatic effect.The dancers also rarely looked directly at the audience or at each other, denying us the kind of interaction which helps solicit an emotional response. Occasionally, a duo would touch, like a man wrapping his arms around a woman, from behind, and the touch would seem electric because it was so rare. Yet the couple would always detach so quickly, without looking at each other or avoiding looking at each other, that it would suck out all the potential emotion from the interaction.
The movements themselves also serve to dehumanize the dancers, creating a wall between them and the audience, preventing an emotional connection. Two or more bodies will contort and interlock, creating a jumble of limbs and body parts: they become bodies not people. There is even a number where two bodies are hoisted up by two other dancers each, holding them above their heads horizontally, as though at a funeral march.
Cunningham’s choreography seems to be about making magnificent shapes more than it is about creating human connection.The dancers aren’t given the opportunity for personalities and instead are difficult to tell apart, dressed in nearly identical solid-coloured leotards with only slight variations in stripes: you’ll notice I’m not using the names of dancers here because it was nearly impossible to keep track of who is who. It is ironic that in a piece where the individual is emphasized over the group – rarely are all dancers moving in the exact same way – the individuals themselves are indistinguishable.
Nearly 90² could not be further from the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies I grew up worshipping. While Astaire and Rogers dance their way into each other hearts, Cunningham’s dancers move gracefully and beautifully without detectable emotion or story. When Astaire and Rogers dance in Top Hat, it’s a celebration of the music, and their tap shoes are a percussion instrument enriching the rhythm and music. Cunningham’s dancers do move with grace and rhythm, but there is no rhythmic background that they are building on, no rhythm in Cage’s noise to accentuate. Yet programmed as I am to see Astaire and Rogers as the holy grail of dancing, I did not hate Nearly 90².
Nearly 90² offers a series of beautiful movements, like sculptures in motion; the beginning even has a series of tableaus that come to life and then freeze again. But there is no sense of story or progression either within the individual solos, duos, trios, quartets, sextets or from one number to the next. Without characters or emotional attachment, how can there be a sense of progress? Even the noises had no shape, preventing the music from helping to drive the action.
You could walk into the performance at any time without missing anything, and walk out at any time, without feeling like you missed the ‘end’. It is not boring and it is hardly even repetitive, but without emotional investment, being trapped in a theater for eighty minutes, unable to move or talk or discuss what you’re seeing, can begin to feel like torture: you wonder whether your neighbour is seeing something in the dance that you don’t and you know that by the time you have the opportunity to ask, it will be too late to see it for yourself. When the end finally came, I did notice those robotic perpendicular motions from the beginning reappearing. I’m just not sure if I knew the end was near because of this or because I had been sneaking glances at my watch every ten minutes in the last half hour.
