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Marked by Merce
By Rachel
Straus
Four Cunningham dancers, past and a present, tell how his work
helped them discover themselves.
Imagine being told
to dance on the tops of your metatarsals, with straight legs.
How about straddling the shoulders of a standing dancer, a
foot taller than you, with little hurdle room and no helpers?
What about performing at a world-class theater without having
heard the music, or rehearsing with a wandering set design
that’s as light as a feather and as large as two people? These
challenges are par for the course when working with
avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Cunningham’s
dancers, who number more than 100 since his company’s
inception in 1953, are drawn to the 89-year-old (as of April)
former Graham dancer because of his ever-expanding movement
explorations, which include working with a computer animation
software program, Life Forms (now called DanceForms).
None of his dancers perform for fame, nor do their roles
spotlight them. They perform because of the challenges, both
physical and intellectual.
Four generations of
Cunningham dancers—Gus Solomons jr, Catherine Kerr, Neil
Greenberg, and Jennifer Goggans—told us what makes working
with Cunningham fascinating. Their answers couldn’t be more
different, and that points to a salient fact: Cunningham
doesn’t ask his dancers to perform a character (such as the
lover or the rogue), nor does he ask them to project a mood or
a specific emotion. As a result, his work gives them room to
perform as themselves. This, say these dancers, helps them
harness their innate theatricality and explore their
personality unburdened by the societal labels and stereotypes
that often accompany conventional dancing roles.
“Merce always speaks
to us as though we can do whatever he asks,” says Jennifer
Goggans, who is in her eighth year with the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company. Being pushed on a daily basis into the
physically unknown and untried, and sometimes skirting a
danger zone, is not for all dancers. But Goggans considers
Cunningham’s requests the ultimate sign of his trust in her
abilities.
Performing in
Cunningham’s company wasn’t a lifelong dream for the
Owensboro, KY, native. In her teens Goggans briefly
entertained becoming a ballet dancer, but she was too quirky,
she says, to fit happily into tutu-wearing roles. Nor did she
want to be limited to life in a corps de ballet or in a
company without international standing. With an eclectic dance
background, including jazz, gymnastics, ballet, and four years
of Cunningham technique with Catherine Kerr at Purchase
College Conservatory of Dance (and three years at the
Cunningham studio), Goggans joined the company the month she
graduated with her BFA.
Though she had
performed with MOMIX and Louisville Ballet, it is working with
Cunningham that has allowed Goggans to tap the unique and
contradictory in her personality. Soft-spoken and shy, the
petite dancer demonstrates in Cunningham’s dances what a
powerhouse she really is. “Jump in the air,” Cunningham will
tell her in rehearsal, she says. “Tilt your back. Arch it.
Twist it. Move your right arm this way. Move it again. OK.
Let’s see it.” And finally, “by the 20th time,” says
Goggans, “you did it.” She describes Cunningham’s
counterintuitive steps in lilting tones, with a
wide-eyed expression and involuntary giggles, but there is
nothing girlish about her presence onstage. The force of her
character and audacious physicality bursts through.
Minnesota-born
Neil Greenberg, a choreographer and professor at
University of California–Riverside, danced in the Cunningham
company from 1979 to 1986. His subsequent work, which
includes non-virtuoso movement, biographical material, and pop
music, has garnered him a Bessie Award, a Time Out/New York
Dance Audience Bessie Award, a Guggenheim and other
fellowships, and commissions from Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White
Oak Dance Project, among other commendations. In his Bessie
Award–winning Not-About-AIDS-Dance (1994), Greenberg
presented a personal matter (he tested positive in 1986) and
the worst of losses (his brother’s death from AIDS-related
complications) through cut-to-the-quick projected words and
whimsical movement.
Greenberg’s work has
a narrative-inflected, camp sensibility that he says is a
direct development of working with Cunningham. “When I got to
the Cunningham studio,” says Greenberg, who was then 20 and
had withdrawn from The Juilliard School, “I was asked just to
dance, and to dance as a full person. It was to me a step out
of the closet. Merce’s work opened a space for gay and lesbian
dancers to perform onstage as themselves.” Cunningham,
Greenberg adds, never asked him to make his lyrical
physicality more “macho,” as did some choreographers he had
worked with.
During his seven
years in the company, watching his fellow Cunningham dancers
sculpt their bodies into abstract shapes and drive themselves
through non-metered phrases, Greenberg began to discover his
choreographic voice. In rehearsals he contemplated the
dancers’ lives and thought, “What if I let the audience know
about the dancers personally?” Though he emphasizes that this
was a subconscious formulation, his work—since forming Dance
by Neil Greenberg in 1986—does just that, blending the
personal and the abstract. “Sometimes I can see that my whole
body of work is trying to find experiences for the audience
where they might find the potency that I found watching
Merce’s choreography in his studio.”
Cunningham master
teacher Catherine Kerr initially trained as a ballet dancer.
She held a scholarship at the National Ballet School in
Washington, DC, until she developed into a long-limbed,
curvaceous woman, an anathema in the slim-hipped ballet world.
After obtaining a liberal arts degree, Kerr joined the
Cunningham company in 1974 and, except for a brief hiatus,
stayed until 1988. During her 14-year tenure with Cunningham
she showed the same exacting attention to detail as medieval
scribes gave to their lettering. Kerr, says former company
colleague Karen Eliot, stood out for her drive “to get it
right.”
Kerr became the
dancer Cunningham sought, again and again, as his partner
onstage. Her long-standing partnership with the choreographer
and her devotion to his work prompted her, in 1988, at age 40,
to teach his technique full time. “I wanted to leave the
company,” Kerr says, “once I felt I had given something back
to Merce, when I no longer looked afraid onstage and presented
the work with assurance.”
In London, she
taught at the Rambert Dance Company, the Laban Institute, and
the London Contemporary Dance School. She set
Cunningham’s dances on Rotterdanse Dansgroep,
Charleroi/Dances, Paris Opéra Ballet, Rambert Dance Company,
Maggio Danza, and the Ballet de Lorraine. Three of Kerr’s
students—Jean Freebury, Jennifer Goggans, and Mandy Kirshner—entered
the company shortly after studying with her. The intellectual
and physical challenge is what keeps Kerr devoted to
Cunningham’s aesthetic. “It’s incredibly rigorous,” she says.
“You are what your training is. Merce was my primary teacher
for 14 years.”
Gus Solomons jr,
originally from Boston, MA, began dancing with Cunningham only
three years after receiving an architecture degree from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, he began
his formal dance training at Boston Conservatory of Music.
Solomons remembers being surprised that Cunningham invited him
to perform because the company had no dancers of color until
his arrival in 1964. “It was very empowering to discover,”
says Solomons, who had been working with Martha Graham, “that
I could be out there naked with just the steps.” But because
of a back injury Solomons left the company after four years.
Forty years later,
Solomons still sees Cunningham’s influence as seminal. “Merce
gave you courage to do the next impossible thing,” he says.
“You discover a lot more range.” In turn, Solomons’ career
encompasses a near-impossible number of activities.
An associate arts professor at New York University, he teaches
composition and a Cunningham-based class. He serves as a dance
critic for three publications. He toured the country in
2006 as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, interviewing
himself, performing three improvisations, and extemporizing on
topics selected by students and teachers in the audience. He
has danced for more than 10 companies and has formed two of
them. (The current group, Paradigm, includes three founding
members who are over age 60.) A choreographer for
30 years, Solomons won a Bessie Award for sustained
achievement in choreography in 2000. Most recently he is
trying acting, performing the title role in an Off-Broadway
production of Othello.
“In a way,” says
Solomons, “my approach is the opposite of Merce’s
single-mindedness—devoting all his resources to making dances.
I crave diversification, utilizing all aspects of my
experience in dance in different ways.” But Solomons’ work
style and Cunningham’s choreography both thrive on complexity.
“Merce looks for the ones that can do the impossible things
that he asks for and still maintain their humanity,” says
Solomons.
It is this strange
humanism—delivered through an abstract prism where a person is
neither black nor white, male nor female, star nor corps de
ballets dancer—that makes Cunningham’s half-century body of
work so enduring. Solomons, Kerr, Greenberg, and Goggans
underline that Cunningham gave them the most challenging
material of their dancing lives. It honed in them an
unflinching honesty toward a performance and in developing a
worldview. “My experience of Merce’s work,” says Greenberg,
“is life as that feeling of pleasure and pain. It’s a place of
struggle as well as a place of joy.”
“Merce always speaks
to us as though we can do whatever he asks,” says Jennifer
Goggans, who is in her eighth year with the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company. Being pushed on a daily basis into the
physically unknown and untried, and sometimes skirting a
danger zone, is not for all dancers. But Goggans considers
Cunningham’s requests the ultimate sign of his trust in her
abilities.
Performing in
Cunningham’s company wasn’t a lifelong dream for the
Owensboro, KY, native. In her teens Goggans briefly
entertained becoming a ballet dancer, but she was too quirky,
she says, to fit happily into tutu-wearing roles. Nor did she
want to be limited to life in a corps de ballet or in a
company without international standing. With an eclectic dance
background, including jazz, gymnastics, ballet, and four years
of Cunningham technique with Catherine Kerr at Purchase
College Conservatory of Dance (and three years at the
Cunningham studio), Goggans joined the company the month she
graduated with her BFA.
Though she had
performed with MOMIX and Louisville Ballet, it is working with
Cunningham that has allowed Goggans to tap the unique and
contradictory in her personality. Soft-spoken and shy, the
petite dancer demonstrates in Cunningham’s dances what a
powerhouse she really is. “Jump in the air,” Cunningham will
tell her in rehearsal, she says. “Tilt your back. Arch it.
Twist it. Move your right arm this way. Move it again. OK.
Let’s see it.” And finally, “by the 20th time,” says
Goggans, “you did it.” She describes Cunningham’s
counterintuitive steps in lilting tones, with a
wide-eyed expression and involuntary giggles, but there is
nothing girlish about her presence onstage. The force of her
character and audacious physicality bursts through.
Minnesota-born
Neil Greenberg, a choreographer and professor at
University of California–Riverside, danced in the Cunningham
company from 1979 to 1986. His subsequent work, which
includes non-virtuoso movement, biographical material, and pop
music, has garnered him a Bessie Award, a Time Out/New York
Dance Audience Bessie Award, a Guggenheim and other
fellowships, and commissions from Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White
Oak Dance Project, among other commendations. In his Bessie
Award–winning Not-About-AIDS-Dance (1994), Greenberg
presented a personal matter (he tested positive in 1986) and
the worst of losses (his brother’s death from AIDS-related
complications) through cut-to-the-quick projected words and
whimsical movement.
Greenberg’s work has
a narrative-inflected, camp sensibility that he says is a
direct development of working with Cunningham. “When I got to
the Cunningham studio,” says Greenberg, who was then 20 and
had withdrawn from The Juilliard School, “I was asked just to
dance, and to dance as a full person. It was to me a step out
of the closet. Merce’s work opened a space for gay and lesbian
dancers to perform onstage as themselves.” Cunningham,
Greenberg adds, never asked him to make his lyrical
physicality more “macho,” as did some choreographers he had
worked with.
During his seven
years in the company, watching his fellow Cunningham dancers
sculpt their bodies into abstract shapes and drive themselves
through non-metered phrases, Greenberg began to discover his
choreographic voice. In rehearsals he contemplated the
dancers’ lives and thought, “What if I let the audience know
about the dancers personally?” Though he emphasizes that this
was a subconscious formulation, his work—since forming Dance
by Neil Greenberg in 1986—does just that, blending the
personal and the abstract. “Sometimes I can see that my whole
body of work is trying to find experiences for the audience
where they might find the potency that I found watching
Merce’s choreography in his studio.”
Cunningham master
teacher Catherine Kerr initially trained as a ballet dancer.
She held a scholarship at the National Ballet School in
Washington, DC, until she developed into a long-limbed,
curvaceous woman, an anathema in the slim-hipped ballet world.
After obtaining a liberal arts degree, Kerr joined the
Cunningham company in 1974 and, except for a brief hiatus,
stayed until 1988. During her 14-year tenure with Cunningham
she showed the same exacting attention to detail as medieval
scribed gave to their lettering. Kerr, says former company
colleague Karen Eliot, stood out for her drive “to get it
right.”
Kerr became the
dancer Cunningham sought, again and again, as his partner
onstage. Her long-standing partnership with the choreographer
and her devotion to his work prompted her, in 1988, at age 40,
to teach his technique full time. “I wanted to leave the
company,” Kerr says, “once I felt I had given something back
to Merce, when I no longer looked afraid onstage and presented
the work with assurance.”
In London, she
taught at the Rambert Dance Company, the Laban Institute, and
the London Contemporary Dance School. She set
Cunningham’s dances on Rotterdanse Dansgroep,
Charleroi/Dances, Paris Opéra Ballet, Rambert Dance Company,
Maggio Danza, and the Ballet de Lorraine. Three of Kerr’s
students—Jean Freebury, Jennifer Goggans, and Mandy Kirshner—entered
the company shortly after studying with her. The intellectual
and physical challenge is what keeps Kerr devoted to
Cunningham’s aesthetic. “It’s incredibly rigorous,” she says.
“You are what your training is. Merce was my primary teacher
for 14 years.”
Gus Solomons jr.,
originally from Boston, MA, began dancing with Cunningham only
three years after receiving an architecture degree from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, he began
his formal dance training at Boston Conservatory of Music.
Solomons remembers being surprised that Cunningham invited him
to perform because the company had no dancers of color until
his arrival in 1964. “It was very empowering to discover,”
says Solomons, who had been working with Martha Graham, “that
I could be out there naked with just the steps.” But because
of a back injury Solomons left the company after four years.
Forty years later,
Solomons still sees Cunningham’s influence as seminal. “Merce
gave you courage to do the next impossible thing,” he says.
“You discover a lot more range.” In turn, Solomons’ career
encompasses a near-impossible number of activities.
An associate arts professor at New York University, he teaches
composition and a Cunningham-based class. He serves as a dance
critic for three publications. He toured the country in
2006 as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, interviewing
himself, performing three improvisations, and extemporizing on
topics selected by students and teachers in the audience. He
has danced for more than 10 companies and has formed two
companies. (The current group, Paradigm, includes three
founding members who are over age 60.) A
choreographer for 30 years, Solomons won a Bessie Award for
sustained achievement in choreography in 2000. Most recently
he is trying acting, performing the title role in an
Off-Broadway production of Othello.
“In a way,” says
Solomons, “my approach is the opposite of Merce’s
single-mindedness—devoting all his resources to making dances.
I crave diversification, utilizing all aspects of my
experience in dance in different ways.” But Solomons’ work
style and Cunningham’s choreography both thrive on complexity.
“Merce looks for the ones that can do the impossible things
that he asks for and still maintain their humanity,” says
Solomons.
It is this strange
humanism—delivered through an abstract prism where a person is
neither black nor white, male nor female, star nor corps de
ballets dancer—that makes Cunningham’s half-century body of
work so enduring. Solomons, Kerr, Greenberg, and Goggans
underline that Cunningham gave them the most challenging
material of their dancing lives. It honed in them an
unflinching honesty toward a performance and in developing a
worldview. “My experience of Merce’s work,” says Greenberg,
“is life as that feeling of pleasure and pain. It’s a place of
struggle as well as a place of joy.”
Above picture: Former Cunningham dancer Gus Solomons
jr, pictured here performing at Jacob’s Pillow, says that
“Merce gave you courage to do the next impossible thing.”
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