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(FOR MERCE CUNNINGHAM)
By Yvonne Rainer
This is the story of a man who ...
She pondered the problem of
writing about him for a long time. She thought about it in several
ways. What had she to say? If she were he, what would she like to read?
She might find the whole enterprise somewhat unsettling. Milestones are
nothing if not lodestones. What would he like to hear about from her?
What could be a gift of inspiration equivalent to what he had given
her? She had been at the Graham School for a year knowing that she
would end up at his place which had just opened up above the Living
Theater on 14th St. and 6th Ave. She had heard funny stories about that
Cage coterie, but she trusted that she would be no more taken in by all
that than she had by all that Graham stuff. She would get what she
needed and split. She can't remember her first class with him, but the
first impressions he left with her remain: At a big loft party
somewhere he was standing with Carolyn Brown. She went over to him and
said she couldn’t study with him yet because she was still busy with
Graham, but it was only a matter of time - or something like that. This
sly smile came over his face. If she knew that he had danced with
Graham she certainly wasn’t thinking about it then; in fact she didn't
give that sly smile a second thought. Now of course, she can attribute
all sorts of things to it - like “The old bag is still raking them in,”
or “racking them up.” She now is remembering that her first classes
with him were so quiet. He was so quiet and unemphatic. He just danced,
and when he talked it was with a quiet earnestness that both soothed
and exhilarated her. His physical presence - even when involved in the
most elusive material - made everything seem possible. “It was truly
the beginning of a Zeitgeist” she thinks: “You just do it, with the
coordination of a pro and the non-definition of an amateur.” Of course!
It all comes flooding back to her: those early impressions of him
dancing with that unassailable ease that made him look as though he was
doing something totally ordinary. She knew that she would never dance
like that. The ballet part of the shapes he chose she could only
parody. But that ordinariness and pleasure were accessible to her. “No”
she thinks, “she didn't know that then to articulate it like that but
she knew about ‘just doing it’ because she remembers saying that to her
friend Nancy Meehan and she knew there were specific things she could
copy and other things she would absorb by watching and being around him.” So she applied herself to learning the work part of his
teaching: careful, sequential placing of different parts of the body on
the floor in 4/4 time that carried the body from one side of the room
to the other; sudden spurts of furious swift movement reversing
direction on a dime; long long combinations with different parts - some
slow, some fast - like the one from Aeon that ends with passé on
half-toe and you stay there for awhile. And - as Judy Dunn later
remarked on that one - “And everybody did it.” Stayed there for awhile.
Then there were the ones where one part of the body did one thing while
another part did another, maybe even in a different rhythm. This in
particular, as a way of multiplying movement detail, was later to
characterize some of her own work. But mostly it was that mysterious
ease of his - which he may even have tried to account for when he would
say “down down down get your weight down” and now she is not really
sure if he actually said that or if she saw it: him rooted in space, so
to speak, even while in motion. She sees him in her mind’s eye sailing
and wheeling and dipping and realizes that it is always in the studio
on 14th Street that she sees him rather than in more recent studios or
in performance. That was where she saw him best.
2. The next day
she takes another whack at it, and more memories surge in. He had to
put up with a lot. They came and went and hung on his every word and
paraded their callow opinions and innocence while he already had been
doing it so much longer and knew all too clearly that the rewards would
only be commensurate with the effort, that is - the reward of more work
for work done. “You must love the daily work” he would say. She loved
him for saying that, for that was one prospect that thrilled her about
dancing - the daily involvement that filled up the body and mind with
an exhaustion and completion that left little room for anything else.
Beside that exhaustion, opinion paled. And beside that sense of
completion, ambition had to be especially tenacious. But while
absorbing the spirit of his genius she fought its letter. Her fantasies
of her Show of Shows incorporated frenzied Bacchanalias of Cunningham
Technique performed by the rankest of amateurs. Or ten dwarves and one
bearded lady did the exercises-on-six. Or a contortionist performed
them backwards (body-wise). Etc. Sophomoric fantasies of vindication
against the tyranny of his discipline, which - even as she was
objecting in terms both moral and aesthetic - was moving her ever
nearer to her own body-ease. Now it is almost impossible for her to
separate the fused lines of his influence. She has given much thought
to teaching, to the two modes of the teaching-learning process - the
one that can be codified and articulated, and the one that resists such
efforts yet exerts perhaps an even more powerful influence and lies
somewhere in a kind of reciprocal empathy, not to be confused with
equality. “Oh Christ” she thinks. “Don't get into a discourse on
education now. What you were actually talking about was the fusion of
your need to make a polemic out of your physical inadequacies with his
technique - the fusion of that with his deeper effect on you.” Then she
visualizes herself running some years back and remembers the
exhilaration and freedom and knows that she came as close as she would
ever come to what she imagined he must have felt as he wheeled and
dipped and glided in the studio on 14th Street. And she gives him his
due for the part he played in that running.
Now she doesn't see very much of him anymore, but when she does she feels very happy.
New York City
March, 1973
(First published in Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961-73, Halifax: The Press of
the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design / New York: University Press
1974, pp. 327-329; republished in corpus by friendly permission of the
author.)
(Dec. 9, 2008)
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