Cunningham (2019) - full transcript

The iconic Merce Cunningham and the last generation of his dance company is stunningly profiled in Alla Kovgan's 3D documentary, through recreations of his landmark works and archival footage of Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg.

♪♪♪

CUNNINGHAM: I never was

interested in dancing that referred

fo a mood, or a

feeling, or in a sense,

expressed the music.

So that the dancing

does not refer.

It is what it is.

It's that whole

visual experience.

♪♪♪

[FINGERS SNAPPING]

Out. Stretch.

[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]

Two, down and down.

Up. Yeah. Step.

Hold. Hold. Hold.

♪♪♪

JOURNALIST: Tonight, the world of

dance welcomes Merce Cunningham.

He has asked us not to call him

an avant-garde choreographer,

or a modern dance choreographer.

So I'm going to ask him

what we may call him.

CUNNINGHAM: Well, I'm a dancer.

JOURNALIST: That

says everything?

CUNNINGHAM: Well,

that's sufficient for me.

♪♪♪

CUNNINGHAM: Since my dancers

and I are a group of human beings,

we are that on the stage,

as we are in real life,

people moving

around in various ways.

But we don't

interpret something.

We present something,

we do something,

and then any kind

of interpretation is left

up to anybody looking

at it in the audience.

CUNNINGHAM: My idea about

movement is that any movement

is possible for dancing.

That ranges all the way

from nothing, of course,

up to the most extended

kind of movement

that one might think up.

JOURNALIST: Your

background is in modern dance,

is it, Merce Cunningham?

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

JOURNALIST: Now, did you

evolve a technique of your own?

CUNNINGHAM: Well,

physically or technically,

I was interested in extending

movement possibilities

as I saw them.

I thought that a ballet

technique for the legs

was astonishing, and I thought

many things in the modern dance

were remarkable for the torso.

And so I tried to find

ways to combine those

to make a body which

was flexible and pliant

and allowed for as many

movement possibilities

as I could see.

CUNNINGHAM: Dance exercises

over dancers an insidious attraction

that makes them work hours daily

at perfecting an instrument

which is really

deteriorating from birth.

To what end this

eternal daily struggle?

Because inside of

all that is an ecstasy.

Brief perhaps, not

always released,

but when it is, like

a moment in balance

when all things great

and small coincide.

This can happen at any moment,

and when it does for a dancer,

he can smile without knowing it.

There is no guarantee

of this, but it does exist.

We see it, and we know it.

[CARS HONKING]

NARRATOR:

CUNNINGHAM: Myself, I don't

think of discipline as, like, rules.

I think of discipline as

being something private,

which, in the case of a dancer,

he realizes that the discipline,

say, of going to

class, is part of his life.

He arrives at this

point within himself.

It's more like meditation,

devotion, I think,

than anything else.

♪♪♪

CUNNINGHAM: I went to

school in Seattle, Washington,

and Mr. Cage was there,

and he taught us a

composition class.

And it was so remarkable,

I never forgot this.

The next year, I

went to New York,

and Mr. Cage joined eventually.

So he's been writing

music for me ever since.

♪♪♪

CAGE: People have,

um, often defended art

on the grounds

that life was a mess,

and that, therefore,

we needed art

in order to escape from life.

I would like to have an art

that was so, uh, bewildering,

complex, and, uh, illogical

that we would return

to everyday life with,

uh, great pleasure.

♪♪♪

[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]

There is no such thing

as silence.

CAGE: I have nothing to say,

and I am saying it.

And that is poetry

as I need it.

[WOMAN VOCALIZING]

BROWN: First time I

met Merce Cunningham,

he was touring the

States with John Cage.

I'd never seen

anyone move like that,

from such a quiet center,

with such animal authority

and human passion.

CAGE: Merce Cunningham's

doctor used to be Dr. Lotman.

Dr. Lotman's the

one who prescribed

Merce's vitamin pills

and breakfast powders.

He told Merce to sit when

he didn't have to stand,

to lie down when

he didn't have to sit,

and to sleep whenever

he could sleep.

Possessed of an

active disposition,

Cunningham keeps busy

even when he's sitting.

With pen or pencil

he makes calendars,

circling the days

involving performances

or other engagements.

One calendar finished,

he starts another.

For years, sitting at

the breakfast table,

he taught himself Russian.

This enabled him to speak

in their language to members

of the Bolshoi Ballet

before performing

with his company for them.

Having learned

to knit, he knitted

the many-colored costume

he wears in "Lavish Escapade."

[STATIC BUZZING]

CUNNINGHAM: I simply decided

years ago that I would make

a dance free of the music.

And then we would put the

sound and the dance together.

JOURNALIST: Then, actually,

you have never heard his music,

and has he seen your

dance? CUNNINGHAM: No.

JOURNALIST: And the

night of the performance,

you will combine the two?

CUNNINGHAM

[CHUCKLING]: With any luck.

JOURNALIST: What, then,

reactions have you had to that?

[LAUGHING] Well, all the

way from absolute stupefaction

on the part of an

audience to, uh...

to people liking it very much.

NARRATOR:

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

♪♪♪

CUNNINGHAM: When I

began to work with dancers

who were trained

in other techniques,

it didn't function for me.

So I decided that

maybe if I could teach...

♪♪♪

I must say the

first class I gave,

There was one

person who showed up,

a wonderful Marianne

Preger-Simon,

who said, "Well, will

you give the class?"

And I said yes. So I began.

DILLEY: I've always felt,

during the time when

I worked with him,

although he was giving out

all of the activity that we did,

there was a great space

for you to do it yourself.

FARBER: I think that

Merce was interested

in what could be considered

our flaws as dancers.

And he hesitated to correct us

unless he just got

irritated by what he saw.

I think he was much

more of an artist

rather than a teacher

who was going to try

to get us to do things

up to some perfect

and ideal standard.

SETTERFIELD: I

found I was doing things

that I never dreamed

were possible.

And the world was

opening up in a whole way

that I hadn't understood.

GUS: The thing that's so

hard about working with Merce

is that he demands that

you are first of all yourself

as a human being,

and from that, a dancer.

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

SETTERFIELD: And you move on it?

Yes. There again,

you can walk up or not.

CUNNINGHAM: I myself

never liked that competitive thing

that so much of dancing

seemed to me to have,

so I never tried to do

that in my own situation.

I went on the assumption

that each dancer was a person

who had certain abilities.

I would attempt to

let each of the dancers

find out for himself

how he danced,

what kind of a person

he was in that situation.

It's not politics,

it was dancing,

but that's as reasonable

a place to do that

as any other situation.

MAN: One, two, three,

four, five, six, seven, eight.

[PIANO PLAYING]

CUNNINGHAM: In the early '50s,

that point that my company,

So to speak, began.

I didn't form it. It just began.

We just sort of got together

and tried to keep together.

[CHUCKLING]

That's all there is to it.

[PIANO PLAYING]

Suddenly, there's a

company of three people,

or eight people, or 60 people,

I don't think it matters,

it's only in proportion.

Then you have to

consider all of those people

in all the ways. The

fact that they are people,

they must somehow get

from day to day, you know,

and have some place to sleep,

something to eat, all of that.

And all of that has to be

taken into consideration,

as well as the fact

that you are now

not only responsible for

making a dance for yourself,

but for these other dancers too.

And that implies something

about clothing, heh,

covering them up some way,

something about music,

however you think of that,

and all that gets more...

involves more funds,

one way or another.

But you do it, don't you?

JOURNALIST: The

way you function?

Yes. You find a way

to function or you quit.

JOURNALIST: Yes, of course.

JOURNALIST: What do

you do during rehearsal?

How does this all happen?

CUNNINGHAM: We rehearse,

and then I will keep

track via stopwatch

of a given section.

One of the pieces that we

used to do was "Suite for Five,"

and we could go several months

without rehearsing that dance,

and then do it and we

would come out within,

oh, at the most, 10

seconds difference.

BROWN: Merce's way of

working with a stopwatch,

which so shocked the

modern dance world,

led to the company's

reputation of being cold, inhuman,

impassive,

expressionless automatons.

CUNNINGHAM: It seemed to

me that, in the society around us,

there were so many scientific

possibilities coming up

that one did not have to think

in terms of one thing

following another,

but, say, in a field.

And I began to make dances

with those

possibilities in mind.

So to speak,

compositional method

was by using chance,

or random means.

NARRATOR:

CUNNINGHAM: If I don't like what

comes up with the chance procedures,

do I then throw it away?

In other words,

do I let my taste

enter this thing?

And I, uh, don't.

I try it out.

BROWN: Our

audiences were artists.

The great American painters,

they were just

becoming well-known.

They were still poor.

RAUSCHENBERG: Well, the people

who really seemed to accept my work

were dancers and musicians,

while I was considered a

clown by nearly everyone else.

And, uh, I found

a lot more rapport

with, uh, their ideas

about what, uh, art was

than I did with

a lot of painters.

CAGE: We became

friends immediately.

We understood, without speaking,

how the other one felt.

Almost a sense of identity.

♪♪♪

CUNNINGHAM: Bob

Rauschenberg described it once,

he said we have only

two things in common,

our ideas and our

poverty. Ha-ha-ha.

I thought that was a

marvelous description.

And it brought us together.

[PIANO PLAYING]

RAUSCHENBERG: Merce is

not the easiest person to work with

in the first place.

He hates sets.

[MERCE LAUGHING]

RAUSCHENBERG: He hates costumes.

So I mean, you really

have to work around

without his even noticing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CUNNINGHAM: I said, "Bob, I

want to wear a chair on my back"

in one of the dances.

He looked at me,

and then a few

minutes later he said:

"If you have a chair,

can I have a door?"

And I said,

"Certainly. Why not?"

[PIANO PLAYING]

RAUSCHENBERG: One of the most

amazing things about our collaboration

was sort of a

carte-blanche trust,

where nobody is

really responsible,

but as a group of people,

are not irresponsible.

And I think that creates a

kind of a wonderful feeling

about the

possibilities of society.

CUNNINGHAM: I don't

know what will happen

until it's put, let's say,

in the first performance.

I prefer to risk, so to

speak, to chance that,

that this combination of things,

some of which I

don't know about,

may produce something else.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RAUSCHENBERG: I used

to be so jealous of John

because John couldn't

do anything wrong,

but making costumes and

sets... [MAN LAUGHING]

I was always in the

furniture business,

and you can trip overeither

the set or the costumes.

But you can't trip on a note.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CUNNINGHAM: Well,

in "Summerspace,"

all I said was that the

dance didn't have any center.

RAUSCHENBERG: I

knew what you meant.

There was gonna be just

as much dancing in the wings.

So I planned a kind

of a camouflage.

So if anybody hesitated,

they were lost in

the background.

[PIANO PLAYING]

CUNNINGHAM: We worked

on "Summerspace" today.

In Summerspace,

the principal momentum

was the concern

for steps that carry

one through space.

Like the passage of birds

stopping for moments

on the ground,

and then going on,

or automobiles

throbbing along turnpikes

and under and

over clover leaves.

The dance came out to have

a great deal of turning in it,

which was upsetting

to the dancers.

"I can't turn."

"How do you turn?"

The only way

to do it is to do it.

CUNNINGHAM: I continued

to work out the dance

every day after teaching,

with all of us growing

wearier as the weeks went on.

And we presented it

on a Sunday matinee,

in the spot costumes

and against the

pointillist backdrop

by Robert Rauschenberg,

and with the graph

music by Morton Feldman.

The audience was puzzled.

♪♪♪

CUNNINGHAM: When we started, we

didn't want to simply stay in New York

and give one program

maybe in a small theater,

and then hope for

the rest of the year

to pay it off, and so on.

So we began to drive.

CAGE: The Cunningham

Company used to make

transcontinental tours

in a Volkswagen Microbus.

Once, when we drove

up to a gas station in Ohio,

and the dancers,

as usual, all piled out

to go to the toilets and

exercise around the pumps.

The station attendant asked me

whether we were a

group of comedians.

I said, "No. We're

from New York."

CUNNINGHAM:

The real collaboration

was all getting into

that Volkswagen bus.

RAUSCHENBERG: I had to sit next

to the driver when we played Scrabble.

Until Carolyn Brown's husband

said that she would have

to leave the company if we

didn't stop playing Scrabble

while we drove

looking for mushrooms.

CUNNINGHAM: It was fun too.

RAUSCHENBERG:

It was horrible too.

CUNNINGHAM: But that's

what we could do, so we did it.

MAN: John...

CAGE: It's been

eaten up by animals.

Hypholomaornaematoloma,

and they are changing the name.

DILLEY: There are nine of you

chugging along from one place

to another, and, uh,

they were very tribal.

And John was incredibly

generous all the time.

He organized these

lovely picnics and...

In those days, we had our

food and lodgings paid for

and got 25 dollars a

performance, and that was it.

CAGE: On top of which they

said the music was impossible.

And there was a lady who

wrote to say that she had come

to New York from a distance,

and that in order to do that

she had had to

employ a babysitter.

And they printed

this in the paper.

The critic printed it.

And that when she got there,

what she saw and what she heard

was so bad, you see,

that she had, so to speak,

been cheated out

of all this money...

The ticket, the train

ticket, and the babysitter.

And then the critic

added that we had no right

to treat people in

this cruel fashion.

♪♪♪

JOURNALIST: When you and

Cage were first touring together

during those early years,

did you have enough belief

in what you were doing

to not be discouraged

by the negative reactions?

CUNNINGHAM: The

only thing for me is that

I really am deeply

fond of dancing.

So no matter how

dire the situation was,

how desperate, I

would wake up one day

and start to work

and suddenly realize

that it was just as interesting

as it always had been,

regardless of the circumstances.

But we also, as we toured,

we began to have

friends... Not many.

But every place there

would be a few people

who would be very interested

in what we had done.

♪♪♪

What's gratifying

to a dancer, really,

is performing, more than...

More than anything else.

Rehearsal has a certain

class, has a certain kind

of gratification,

but not, you know,

not as much as performing,

and we do it so little.

And then when it's

over, what is there?

You know, you go

back to your solitary flat,

and your horrible job,

and there's nothing.

I never thought

that's what it's about.

I think the real thing is

the fact that you continue,

that you keep on doing things,

because it isn't

about the money,

or not having money, or...

anything like that, it's

about making something.

CUNNINGHAM: How do you make

a movement alive, technique or not?

How do you keep in the

dancing, however long studied,

practiced, and repeated,

that spontaneous act

the stance of a

cat can give you?

It is for me a question of faith

and a continuous belief

in the surprise of the instant.

Put aside fatigue, aches,

injuries to the body

and the psyche.

Let the shape and the time

of a single or multiple action

take its weight and measure.

It will be expressive.

BROWN: My first

recollection of "Crises"

was Merce was making for himself

all these wonderful solos.

I mean, they were mad

and lots of dramatic

stuff in them,

and we never got to do that.

And Viola and I said,

“In the next piece

we want to be witches."

And that's what he made.

♪♪♪

BROWN: People

take Merce at his word.

They absolutely believe

him that it's only steps

that he's putting on the

stage, but it isn't true.

It's not a dance of two people.

I mean, the women

do certain things,

but all of the, uh, real action

is initiated by him.

I'm picked up and carried,

and it's also very

little face to face.

That's very much true, I think,

in almost all of

the duet things.

♪♪♪

NEELS:/f I were to go

to him and say, "Merce",

what does this... This exotic

fall that Gus and I do mean?

"What's it supposed

to mean?" You know?

MAN: He'd snort

and turn his back.

He'd take it away from us.

He'd say, don't do it.

Which side are

you going to go to?

All right, hold on,

hold on. Hold on.

Just down,

that's it. That's all.

Is that all right?

Now turn, Gus. That's

right, so that way, Gus.

That's fine.

Now, Sandra, let go.

Take your arms away.

That's right. Now, excuse me...

Now curve your trunk.

Give me this arm.

Bring it right up.

That's it.

DILLEY: Unfortunately,

it doesn't come

ever with any

clear understanding

as to why you are or are not

being included, except that...

Merce is like a painter,

and we're all like

different colors.

And he wants some colors,

and other times, he doesn't.

♪♪♪

BROWN: I think there's

a great sense of love

within the company, one

for the other, and, uh...

Merce isn't able to

express that... openly,

but after a while you sense it.

JOURNALIST: He never

expresses it openly?

Not really... no.

♪♪♪

[MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

[SIREN WAILING]

MAN: San Francisco.

[HORN HONKING]

[SIREN CHIRPING]

[MUSIC PLAYING ON SPEAKERS]

[ROCK MUSIC PLAYING]

4 From dusk till dawn ♪

♪ I've got another

world Of delusion... T

CUNNINGHAM: In "Winterbranch,"

the general idea was darkness.

It was all about violence.

JOURNALIST: I'm interested

to hear you say it

was about violence

because I think, on the whole,

you don't like these

interpretations.

CUNNINGHAM: You see, this piece

by the combination

of the elements

produces this violent display,

but the kind of

violence it produces

is special to each spectator.

One was race riots, and

one was atomic bomb,

and one was concentration camps,

and on and on.

[MUSIC PLAYING ON SPEAKERS]

[MAN YELLING]

[SIREN WAILING]

CUNNINGHAM: The most violent

reaction we received from it was New York.

It was before there was

a great deal of violence

in the United States.

And now we do it and

people no longer take it

as being violent

because they know

there might be violence

when they go out in the street

or even in the

seat next to them.

♪♪♪

JOURNALIST: Now, this world tour

that you just came

back from, tell us about it.

CUNNINGHAM: Well, we started in

Strasbourg and we ended in Tokyo.

And in between

was Paris and Venice

and Vienna and

cities in Germany,

and a month in

London and Stockholm.

Then we went to Poland,

and then we went

to Czechoslovakia.

We were the first Western

dancers to come there.

And we played in a

hall with 3000 people.

♪♪♪

[BELL TOLLING]

[CLANGING]

NARRATOR:

JOURNALIST: But you arouse

such controversy that all audiences

don't greet you the same

way, do they, Merce?

CUNNINGHAM: How do you say

that what was the audience like?

Everybody in the

audience is different.

CUNNINGHAM:

They may all dislike it.

Dislike it for

different reasons.

No more music!

Stop music! MAN:

I've got in my mind

a kind of point of

view of the world,

and I see a kind

of arrow advancing,

and I see Rembrandt's

doing something,

Michelangelo's doing something,

and then John

Cage did something.

I want to go further,

of course. It's natural.

CAGE: This is

Renaissance point of view,

a European point of view,

that everything's

going in a single line.

And we're not

going in a single line.

We're in a field. MAN: Yeah...

And you can also

enter into the field.

♪♪♪

[AUDIENCE CLAPPING]

RAUSCHENBERG: We

were held over in London.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

RAUSCHENBERG: Somehow,

Merce screwed up,

and they liked us.

[MERCE LAUGHING]

Almost ruined our reputation!

♪♪♪

CAGE: Mr. Sarabhai

from Ahmadabad in India,

after seeing a performance

by the Cunningham Company,

asked Merce

whether his dancing was

popular in the United States.

Merce explained that

programs were given principally

in universities and colleges.

Mr. Sarabhai said,

"That isn't what I mean."

Do people do it after dinner?”

[PEOPLE CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY]

NARRATOR:

BROWN: Oh, God.

Six months with the same group

of 20 people is hard.

Anyway, when Bob

left, this was a time

when communication

was particularly poor

between dancers and Merce.

We were kind of scared

of what was going on,

because Merce

was very distressed

and had the responsibility

of the whole thing,

and was dancing

gorgeously the whole time.

NARRATOR:

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

Oh, it's beautiful.

It really is.

Oh! It's infinite

because it goes in with the sky.

Oh, it is fantastic.

JOURNALIST: One of the

strengths of this great company

is its ability to draw to itself

as full-time collaborators

top visual and musical artists,

like Cage, Warhol,

Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Mr. Johns cuts the finishing

touches into the costumes,

and Andy Warhol's silver pillows

wander the stage

cloud-like, looking for a home.

JOURNALIST: Do you

consider your work avant-garde?

CUNNINGHAM: Well, I never

use the word about myself.

JOURNALIST: But you would

then say that yours is new dance.

How would you describe it?

Well, no, I don't

describe it. I do it.

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

[CLAPPING ECHOING]

[CUNNINGHAM

SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

Do it with me. Step

right, left, right, left.

Bah, bah. Leg,

back, turn up, down.

One, four, seven, eight.

Three, four, six.

[CLAPS]

Sweetie, anything I'm

doing is probably wrong.

No, it's nothing.

CUNNINGHAM: And one,

two, three, one, two, three,

four, five, six,

seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,

17, 18, 19, 22.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,

17, 18, 19, 23.

[CLAPPING]

Six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13 14, 15, 16, 17,

18, 19, 24.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14,

15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14,

15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 26.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,

17, 18, 19, 20, stop. All right?

JOURNALIST: Sometimes I

think the urge to communicate

more directly with you is

fairly strong in the dancers,

but they hold it back.

CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

JOURNALIST: Which puts

them into some kind of a conflict.

They have to deal

with the situation,

and they have to figure

so much out for themselves.

Excuse me. Um.

I think that's what

I gamble on. Heh.

JOURNALIST: What

you gamble on? Yes, yes.

That is, it's toward the good

rather than the

bad, heh-heh-heh.

I know that doesn't always work.

Uh...

But I rather think it works

more times than it doesn't.

That is, by putting

somebody in a situation

where they have to make

a decision about something,

is what it amounts

to, rather than

being dependent upon a kind of

now you do this,

then you do this,

and then you do this,

and then you do this.

Excuse me, I must go upstairs.

[PEOPLE CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY]

CAGE: Aware of

the many activities

connected with The Cunningham

Dance Foundation Incorporated,

Jim Klosty asked Merce

whether he felt

like a patriarch.

Two thousand dollars

from the contractor.

Our $5869 and 90 cents,

giving us thus a net

of $23,355 and 10

cents from the benefit.

CAGE: Merce said, "No",

I feel like a bystander

who's been trapped.”

♪♪♪

CUNNINGHAM: I

never believed that idea

that dancing was the

greatest of the arts.

There are too

many low things in it.

Too many feet to take care of,

a great deal of

sweat and plain labor.

♪♪♪

But when it clicks,

there's the rub.

It becomes memorable,

and one can be

seduced all over again.

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

BROWN: The age difference

between Merce and his company

was not that great in

the '50s, as it is now.

So that the family

aspect of the early years

is missing, I think.

And they don't share

their lives in the same way.

They don't eat together,

um, play together.

[BIRDS CHIRPING, SQUAWKING]

BROWN: There was a human being

there, a more total person on stage,

and we were different

from one another,

and he saw those differences.

And I think, today

he's interested

in orchestrating a large

company of dancers.

And in most of the new pieces,

they function as a

group, as a company.

[PIANO PLAYING]

♪♪♪

CAGE: Merce has been

working so long now,

that some very fine dancers

who used to dance with him,

Carolyn Brown, for

instance, and Viola Farber,

and more recently,

Valda Setterfield, have left.

And at the present

moment, the company

is, uh, almost entirely new,

and yet it's magnificent.

CUNNINGHAM: That's because

you have to allow for everybody.

Every single person

has a possibility.

So what I do is not to imitate

Carolyn, but to try some way

to find something that

simply allows each person

to be what they are,

and if I'm lucky,

it will happen.

But I trust that.

♪♪♪

CUNNINGHAM: I

would just like to say

that I'm very grateful for

the dancers in my company,

and the way they

have put up with me...

[CHUCKLES]...and all the

things that we have done together.

I think they have

responded marvelously.

♪♪♪