Dance
Ocean (Merce Cunningham Dance Company)
Waves of approval
thannandrea Poem
Eminent dance writers have often stressed the fallacy of those reviews which try to 'explain' Merce Cunningham's dances. These focus — along the lines of Marcel Duchamp's Dadaism — on aleatoric solutions and the use of an objec- tive, non-emotional movement free from any imposed subjective interpretation. In addition, there is little to say about the `great father', as Cunningham has been called, that has not been said before. One could thus be tempted to do something along the lines of Louis Horst's famous review, namely a blank space, of Paul Taylor/John Cage's 4133", a performance set to silence where the dancer/choreogra- pher stood still for the four minutes and 33 seconds referred to in the title.
Indeed, I could review Cunningham's Ocean by talking of something else, such as Belfast's buzzy nightlife, the fun I had attending a matinee of Tap Dogs or, on a more serious note, the richness of the Belfast Festival at Queen's, the tantalising architectural beauty of the Waterfront Hall and the hypnotising effect of Bill Viola's `The Messenger', exhibited at the Ormeau Baths Gallery. After all, to discuss any of those things would be to remain true to Cunningham's philosophy because each single event affected, in the end, the way I approached the performance and, most of all, reflected my own perception of it. Alas, this is not my style, for I belong to that old- fashioned school of dance writers who still believe in 'informing' the reader. An analy- sis of the dance, moreover, does not neces- sarily entail attaching arbitrarily formulat- ed readings or meanings to the choreographed images.
According to the programme note, Ocean, conceived by Cunningham and the late John Cage, is a tribute to James Joyce whose unfulfilled desire was to write some- thing about the sea. Set in the round, the action runs for 90 minutes, while 112 musi- cians, perched above the audience, play Andrew Culver's score, taking their cues from video monitors that count down the time. Television screens surround the danc- ing space also showing the time ticking away, thus provoking a variety of psycho- logical responses among the viewers. The live `sensorround'-like music is comple- mented by a recording of various marine sounds, such as the lament-like song of whales or the barking of seals. The entrances and the exits of the dancers mark what the programme refers to as a gradual descent into the darkest depths of the sea, starting from its sunlit surface. Still, there is no need to follow the reading provided by printed notes or to start looking for an embedded text.
The dancing, as is usually the case with Cunningham, is pure physical energy that permeates each single gesture or action, departing from the constraints of expres- sive, realistic or narrative modes. Ocean stands out for the pure clarity of its choreo- graphic text, which confers an aura of clas- sical Apollinian beauty on every image. There is also an intoxicating sense of deep spirituality that feeds constantly into the theatricality of the piece, evoking images of the Classical age, when the act of going to the theatre had social and religious impli- cations. At the same time, the presence of the choreographer, watching his dancers and Writing notes at the back of the plat- form, gives the whole event a kind of famil- iar cosiness that dispels any thought of celebratory mystical pomposity.
Another extraordinary aspect of Ocean is the almost innovative quality of the move- ment that surprises even the more knowl- edgeable followers of Cunningham. I am not suggesting that the 78-year-old chore- ographer has changed his well-established choreographic canons. The principles that inform the Cunningham technique and the Cunningham style remain clearly readable throughout the performance. Yet not a sin- gle combination appears as trite, déjà vu or predictable: every choreographic image seems to reiterate the infinite possibilities offered by that particular technique. Indeed, Ocean presents a further devel- opment of the innovations seen in recent work, which stem from and reflect Cun- ningham's approach to Life Forms, the computerised system that allows him to `create' moving figures and to experiment with them. The success of the evening depended greatly on the superb rendition of the dancers, whose intense artistic par- ticipation created an overwhelming theatri- cal tension throughout the auditorium. Bodies like theirs, moreover, are seldom to be seen either in the ballet world or in con- temporary dance. Although Ocean will not be performed in London, the company will soon be at the Barbican. Something to look forward to.
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