Merce Cunningham, Extraordinary Dancer and Legendary Choreographer, Dies at 90

While you have probably already seen the headlines, ML has deemed the news-worthy life and death of Merce Cunningham also ML-worthy (and enough to make an ex-dancer squeeze back into her slippers). If you don't love dance, have never studied it, or have simply never been exposed to it, here are a few key facts about the form and about the man who revolutionized it.

• Modern dance was more or less invented by Martha Graham in the mid-twenties. She's up there with the great modernists. Graham was to dance "what Picasso was to painting, Frank Lloyd Wright was to architecture, and Stravinsky to music."
  
  

Andy Warhol's "Martha Graham; Letter to the World (the Kick)"

• Cunningham joined Graham's company in the '40s, but continued also to study classical ballet, even though the two forms were at vicious odds with one another.

• His simply professed appreciation for both modern and ballet led to what made the Cunningham school of dance so unique and to what would change dance forever.
  

• Cunningham took the best from both worlds: he preserved ballet's turn-out and intense footwork and fused it with modern's fierce focus on the back and torso.

• As this video explains, Cunningham also rejected elements from both, namely, the rigid dependency that ballet always had on music (its "musicality") and also the equally restrictive association between modern dance and "meaning."
  

• Cunningham's artistic partner and famously, his lover, was John Cage, the brilliant composer, philosopher, and music theorist. Together, they developed an "autonomy" of the arts. Choreography and the music that would accompany it were composed separately, for the first time.
  

(John Cage)

• Cunningham risked rejection from his teachers as well as audience alienation. Eventually, the result was a stunning and happy union of tradition and the avant-garde. But in its earliest stages, Cunningham's choreography, liberated in an unprecedented way from the confines of a musical score, sent audiences out of the theater.

• Often, dancers would not have heard the music, seen the sets, or even tried on their costumes until opening night. This freed the performance to comprise what Cunningham called an "Event." To a dancer this might have been terrifying; for the larger world of dance, it was artistic genius.

• Robert Rauschenberg became the third spike in Cunningham's and Cage's creative axis, as a lighting designer and friend. Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Frank Stella have all been part of the company's design team.
  

• Cunningham won a National Medal of Arts and a MacArthur "genius" fellowship.
  

• Cunningham danced in every single one of his company's performances until he was 70.
  

• At 80, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov (who played "Petrovsky" in Season Six of Sex and the City).

• Though arthritic and confined to a wheelchair, he continued to choreograph through his 90th year of life.

• While John Cage primarily provided the music for (against?) his movement, Cunningham also worked with Earle Brown, Brian Eno, and in 2009, Sonic Youth. Watch the video here.
  

• For anyone who has studied dance, there are OPEN CLASSES at the Cunningham Dance Company studio in Manhattan. Anyone up for some scary, sweaty fun? My back tingles just thinking about it.
  

Posted by cheree cheree on Monday, July 27, 2009 at 10:39 AM

First Woman to Win Best Director?

I'm a bit late to the party as this film has been out since late June, but if you have not yet seen The Hurt Locker, then you are doing your eyes and intellect a small injustice. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break), it is said to be the first film on the Iraq war that treats the whole bungled mess of senseless violence fairly, intentionally withholding partisanship in both dialogue and camerawork, even as it follows the stories of three American bomb detonators. It is also a masterpiece, photographically speaking.

Ralph Fiennes makes a cameo (no spoiler).

Jeremy Renner's squinty-eyed gruffness makes for an excellent megalomaniacal hero/antihero.

And Anthony Mackie as the moralizing black Sergeant provides calculated leadership, sympathetic dialogue, and racial balance in a refreshingly non-irritating way.

But the real star is Bigelow herself, known for cinematically sophisticated direction in unfortunately simplistic movies. This time she gets it right, righter than Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah and Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, both Iraq war movies and both box office flops. In contrast, Bigelow's decidedly un-Hollywood, unbiased, grainy and artistically shot film opened to "healthy box office returns" as reported by Reuters, and what is more significant, to ebullient praise from the critics. Might she be the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director? Perhaps it is not surprising, but certainly disappointing, that the only American woman ever (!) to have been nominated is Sophia Coppola, for Lost in Translation (2003). Only two other women on the PLANET have been nominated: the extraordinary Swiss-born Italian director, Lina Wertmüller, for the beautiful, hilarious, and sexually violent Swept Away (1974); and Jane Campion from New Zealand, for The Piano (1993), which I have not seen. For an excellent bio of Ms. Bigelow, please see this piece in the Times from a few weeks ago. Prepare to be impressed.

Posted by cheree cheree on Friday, July 24, 2009 at 1:35 PM