Dance As Still Life

Written By: Lightsey Darst Constellation 17 12.1.11

On a Saturday afternoon at the Walker, in Dance Works I: Merce Cunningham/Robert Rauschenberg, people wander about. Lurking in the little study area under the guise of perusing books on Cunningham and listening to various people talk on headphones, I watch my fellow gallery-goers, who mostly give this gallery a hasty glance. They fix on nothing; no object captures them. The gallery guard looks more than usually dull; she scribbles on a piece of paper with a frustratingly tiny pencil.

On my headphones: “Man is a two-legged creature,” Cunningham said. “I’m no more philosophical than my legs.”

A couple wanders in, separates. She pulls out drawers idly; he wanders from place to place. What they do has little to do with the exhibit, everything to do with how space and time flow between them just now. Watching, you can readily see tensions in their relationship, how they use the exhibit to try out complaisance, rebellion, superiority, etc. With the gallery guard, they make an uneasy trio, the distance between them felt and measured. The man’s got his arms crossed, isn’t stopping to read didactics; he’s waiting for her to be done. She ignores the signal, but her walk’s easy, her shoulders soft, not set. Her posture says indulge me. He gets cold, turns to look at her like a child at its mother, then capitulates, crosses to her, and stands just behind her, in submission and companionship. Tension resolved—except for the gallery guard, whose growing, gnawing boredom brings her closer to this wall, then that one, like a pony about to plunge.

The exhibit: the first in a series of shows exploring the Walker’s recent acquisition of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s sets and costumes. According to Cunningham’s plan, the company ceases operation at the end of this year; MCDC thus becomes a history the Walker, with its long connection to Cunningham, has gleefully snatched up.

The method: watch gallery-goers as if they were performing a dance. Document their tendencies. See how space makes choreography.

At the opening lecture, people school like fish. They turn their flanks and cheeks all at once; move against the flow and you blindside them, then become invisible. Told to listen, they raise obliging planes of face to the speaker, make cow noises in response. We call this paying attention.

The lighting in the Medtronic Gallery blares economic downturn—sour and dim overheads. Under them, everyone hugs the ground; above-space feels forbidden. Objects disposed around the walls, with one long diagonal intrusion, hem the crowd in so that they remain uniform. At edges where flocking’s impossible, low-grade anxiety hums.

But I’m late and run contrariwise to the currents. Because of this I’m less pleased than anyone else here. I like to think I am thinking independently, but maybe everything that follows derives from my initial renegade status.

If I were reviewing: this exhibit is worse than I’d feared. The historicizers have plundered what was live and frozen it to the walls. Some of it is arranged in vitrines, little contrary-to-life dioramas of costumes and props. Some sits up on a curved dais like the furniture at the MIA, a display that I’ve always thought must be a sort of apology for the ordinariness of the things on the dais, as well as a prophylaxis against your using them in an ordinary way, i.e., opening the drawers of the highboys, testing, the chairs. Costumes are squashed in narrow drawers, like dead butterflies, and some few things hang from the ceiling in corners, looking tatty and saggy.

I admit to a fundamental reservation about dance décor being mounted as artwork; this is not the use for which these objects were created. Also, I must confess that I have no respect for history, where history means that things are valuable because of their associations, because Robert Rauschenberg put them together, because Merce Cunningham wore them.

In fact I often have fantasies of destruction when I meet with historical things. At the MCDC performance I revel in RainForest, 1968, décor by Andy Warhol—silver sham-shaped balloons, sheep-sized and fat, some hung from the ceiling and others free to wander, which they do as if on invisible air currents, floating idly this way and that, reflecting pink and aqua light from their puckered lunar surfaces. For the first five minutes I stare at the balloons, mesmerized by their mystic motion, oblivious to a solo someone is performing in a corner.

Then a new dancer comes running out, kicking through the errant balloons like fall leaves, and pops one! I’m alarmed, anxious as when someone says the wrong thing at a party. I think He hurt the Warhol; that’s coming out of his salary. But he goes on with his whimsical hops and tilts, and when a few minutes later a woman comes racing out of the wings and destroys another balloon, I can feel the audience’s glee, as if the popping is an index of the passion of her attack.

Then I have a thought: when the Walker mounts Dance Works Infinity: Warhol, I want to see these balloons set up in a vat that museum-goers can hop into and play around in, like that sea of brightly colored balls at Chuck E. Cheese that I so adored as a child. A Cunningham funhouse! And you could do this with all the sets and costumes, really, set them up to be played with and in. We could use everything up.

Gallery again. Here comes a woman who might have wandered in from grocery shopping; she’s wearing sneakers and khaki pants hemmed too short. She’s aimless, like everyone. What do they think they’re supposed to get?

Meanwhile, I’m stranded among all these picture books that catalog year after year of Cunningham’s career, this premiere, that one, and what do they capture? What lasts of dance? Perennial (i.e., dull) question.

Watching the people who go by. Of course I’m not invisible either—a curiosity that a young couple visits, the woman with the laptop, the person paying attention—how strange. I think I may be giving some piquancy to this exhibit, suggesting an interest here. But not enough, I suppose; they go.

We’re considerably less curious than cats.

The grocery shopper watches a dance clip, standing a little slumped, pelvis forward, hand on her purse-strap, and then she goes too.

Hm. How long would I have to wait for more to happen.

Disembodied voices from everywhere. Silence of the actually live people.

But look at this sign of life I found in a corner: it’s Merce Cunningham, midair. The man had a famous jump, but bag “famous” and look: the legs, the feet entirely stretched, the upper body reaching, but a moment of calm in the midsection, and his head angled slightly down, modestly, as if with a thought about space and time, a quibble on whatever proposition launched him in the first place.

The space he moves through, a bare studio, is a void into which he launches his exploration. It gives permission.

Too depressed by the thought of that windowless room to go see the exhibit today. Because it’s Sunday, that means I won’t be able to see the exhibit for a couple of days, and I’m thinking about what artworks do in the dark. Obviously, what they ever do: sit there dead as the plants most of them are, in some way, made from.

I’m thinking about costumes now, how beautiful they are in their wear. I remember tutus faded and ripped like antique wedding dresses, carrying rows of hook-and-eye armor across the backs of their bodices. But that beauty wasn’t intrinsic. The tutu was beautiful because it spoke of transformation: put me on and you will join all the rest who have, put me on and you and I will both be magic. Pressed in a case, what could the thing mean to me?

Sets and costumes, sets and costumes, everything is set or costume to the performer, everything in the real world, that is. Walking through the library, I pass a girl who’s vintage Molly Ringwald. She also favors the beige modernist couch that sets off a woman’s soft lines. Later on today I’ll sit at the coffee shop, at the counter if I can, wearing something with a high neck I think, sipping cappuccino, and I’ll be there with others who value what artfully arranged junkshop prints and moody earth-tone cashmere sweaters do for their. . . for their. . . I’ve lost the word because I’m not sure what to put on the “inside” of the performance.

Query: if the real world is a performance—what do sets in a gallery mean? A friend points out this conundrum: the Walker exhibits give the MCDC props a second life—as props.

I’m feeling more charitable today. Perhaps it’s that I paused longer before the scratchy, silent, hurried-looking footage of Antic Meet (1958), trying to grasp the experience of Cunningham himself dancing. Today I notice how the costumes from Antic Meet are suspended and rotate slowly in the un-breeze. There might be hidden dancers inside.

I get caught on footage from Rauschenberg’s own dance work Pelican (1963)—a fan or pinwheel of fabric spinning hypnotically. Man-butterflies (men on roller-skates with circular sails on their backs) come closer together, then spin. As they flit by, I see a face, hands, for a moment—then the big fan again. The footage is very short, and starts over. We are in perpetual motion here. I’m a little dizzy.

So everything here looks a little muddy at the edges, the costumes a little sweat-stained—well, it is over after all. Merce Cunningham and John Cage in a video, talking. What is this detritus of your love. Are you glad that someone has archived it?

I may have found more of a way in, but still, there’s no one here but a bored guard.

I pull out the drawers and look at the costumes from Summerspace, then at their backdrop on the wall, noticing how they match, how the dancers must have been camouflaged like flounders in sand. But why are the costumes in a drawer, so far from the backdrop they belong to?

This passive dynamic: I’m just eyes, and I reach with nothing else towards the parachute dress hanging in front of me. If I plunged my hand among those folds, I’d violate the rules. But the fabric’s lush puckers want to be touched. In performance, they sway, flow open, heavily fall, and the figures inside feel their weight as they do their little dance of faux-woe, backs of hands to foreheads. That dance is over now; the dress hanging here confirms how that route of response has closed. Stand further off from the thing you want to touch.

Image List

1) Merce Cunningham Dance Company, RainForest. Photo by Tony Dougherty.

2) Ashley Chen in Interscape with a backdrop by Robert Rauschenberg. Photo by Ruth Fremson.

3) Ellen Cornfield in Minutiae with a set piece by Robert Rauschenberg. Photo by Herb Migdall.

4) Jérôme Bel in Cédric Andrieux. Photo Herman Sorgeloos.