In my shows there is no symbolism or psychology: everything you see finds its meaning in the very moment it is produced and the show is nothing more than what you see. The subject of the dance is the dance itself.
Merce Cunningham
What distinguishes Merce Cunningham from most of the masters of twentieth-century dance is the fact that his work surpasses aesthetic judgments and values. In the face of his systematic and monumental research, conducted in over sixty years of uninterrupted activity, it seems almost marginal to dwell on this or that choreography of his vast repertoire. He continued to question the nature of dance - in his opinion mysteriously elusive and of divine origin and therefore so attractive -, on the ways of being in the space and time of movement, on the choreography and assembly of dances on and off the stage. To the questions raised in him also by contact with an artistic and intellectual milieu that was certainly not and not only choreographic, he was able to give answers that were relevant to his time and yet as objective as possible, so much so that if his time of artistic maturation (the Fifties and Sixties) now coincides only in part with our time, it cannot ignore it. By refuting and overturning one by one all the ancient certainties that had made dance what it was before its calm and systematic revolution, Cunningham changed the way dance itself was thought of, composed and experienced. In this sense he can be considered a pragmatic maieuta, a sort of scientist of movement, capable of opening up new paths and providing new work tools (just consider the multifaceted use of the technology he has been equipped with since the Fifties) to the many enthusiasts of the art of dance and its composition. But Cunningham's work also lends itself to a philosophical reading.
Thanks to this choreographer who was also a dancer for a long time, the problem of the body, in the contemporary perspective, appears in all its complexity: as something not to be taken for granted. And the work of the dancer is far from being reducible to the re-proposal of pre-established patterns. Nietzsche sensed in every thought and every feeling "a powerful master, a stranger who shows the way", a "self that inhabits your body, because "it is your body" (Zarathustra). This Nietzschean intuition that was well suited to stigmatize the work of the pioneer of free dance (Wigman, Dalcroze) echoes the irrefutable observation that the body, nowadays, must instead be placed in a condition close to emptiness. Although constructed by a thousand techniques and in a thousand possible training disciplines, he manages to give birth to something new from himself, if placed in a sort of absence, of silence from which everything can be born.
Cunningham has given much to this research “in silence”, to this experimentation that does not allow itself to be guided by intuition - by Cage, above all, still considered of a romantic nature - but by the oblivion of the self that can correspond to the search for the “other in itself” or the “self of the other”, since the body of the other in its supports, in its contacts, as in its tactile and visual observation, does not reveal itself as an image, a precise anatomical figure, but rather as a sensation, an intensity in a dimension that is no longer only visual but above all temporal. Time, Cunningham suggests, pushes the body to “become-body”, therefore to “become-idea” of the body. At the basis of the inventions and reinventions of modernity in dance - and in particular of that buffer zone called New Dance, inhabited by Cunningham that is halfway between Modern and Postmodern - there is the emptiness of a body that has renounced its power, its dramatic centrality, its individualistic and ideological ethics. There is a body that has dethroned the head to privilege the torso (and Torso is the title of a famous choreography by Cunningham), making the semi-physical zones (the face) almost superfluous to give greater autonomy to the limbs and create a multiplicity of interweavings in which each body is truly a “fragment in itself”.
The orientation towards the “fragment in itself” (which Nietzsche also titled Fragment an sich, but rewarding it with an unlimited da capo) has allowed dance to free itself from its subservience to external contents and, for example, Merce Cunningham to free himself from the tutelage of Martha Graham, the all-encompassing choreographer par excellence, to project himself towards the musical formalism of John Cage who prescribed the use of the informal. The temporal dimension - contrary to what Rudolf Laban had for example professed with the idea of bodies that sculpt space by opening volumes in it - becomes pure rhythm in Cunningham, identifying with the Cagean definition of structure. It is no longer a question, as in Historical Expressionism or in Graham’s dramatic dance, of revealing the contradictions of “matter”, of highlighting its conflicts, but rather of eliminating the “affects” as much as possible since they oppose their spasmodic dynamics to the legibility of time: Cunningham’s materialism, of Heraclitean origin (Heraclitus the philosopher of continuous becoming), conceives matter-time as flowing, dance as water, and the dancer’s body never bathes twice in the same source… Time escapes its power to hold it back.
The importance of Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage in the history of dance lies entirely in this unprecedented revelation of the void. The void that we are and that they have awakened “in the infinity and indefiniteness of our metamorphoses”. Metamorphoses, Deleuze would say, far from “masking the void, reveal it by filling it”. As if the void, to be itself and realize its essence, had to empty itself of its own nothingness and fill itself with being… Cunningham is therefore the choreographer of the void/full and is such in the continuous becoming, he is the pragmatic and Zen-oriented creator, the scientist/poet of fluidity (not as a movement technique but as a Weltanschauung) and of time that flees, not content, however, with fleeing, since in his baggage of choreographies, and in the Events, there is a nomadic “textuality”, as in James Joyce, which returns to memory but arouses another idea of history, especially the history of bodies.
Marinella Guatterini
