Merce Cunningham as I remember him (photograph by Floor, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license, from Wikimedia Commons)
Last night I visited Z Space for my first encounter with SFDanceworks, a contemporary repertory dance company in San Francisco directed by Dana Genshaft. What drew me to the program was excerpts from a few works that Merce Cunningham had choreographed during the last decade of the last century, when he was in his seventies. My own encounters with Cunningham took place during the Sixties, and I used to enjoy writing about performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for the sheer pleasure of it. (An account of a winter season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music began as a day-by-day diary, which was subsequently published as an article in Ballet Review. Back in the early nineties, Richard Kostelanetz compiled the collection of articles Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time; and my article was included.)
That should provide sufficient background for me to assert that last night’s Cunningham selections in no way resembled anything I had seen performed by his own company. The closest I could come to a positive memory took place when Rita Bullwinkel recited some of the brief stories that John Cage had included in his Indeterminacy book. Cage himself had read those stories aloud as the only “music” to accompany performances of Cunningham’s “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run.” Had they not have been as engaging as they were then I first encountered them, I would have dismissed last night’s program as a complete waste of time.
Mind you, the program included two world premiere performances of works by Brett Conway (“Troupe Pas-de-Cha!”) and Jermaine Spivey (“Til the Act Takes Too”). Neither of these pieces lasted very long, but they felt like they went on forever. While I appreciate the intentions behind the program Genshaft prepared, readers probably know the joke about what happens when those intentions pave a road!
