Merce Cunningham

When Merce Cunningham died a week ago Sunday I kept looking back at a photograph of his foot from the 1958 production of "Antic Meet." He was dressed in black, against a black background, so all that showed was his face, hands, and left foot pointed straight down in a leap with a chair strapped to his back.

That foot captured the essence of dance. The straightness of the line resulted from the raw talent and anatomy of the dancer, the pointing that looked so natural was the product of years of practice, the lighting came from a production designed to showcase dance, and the lens captured what the audience saw.

The obituaries and eulogies carried the usual biographical information and praised his choreography for blendeding modern dance with traditional ballet to capture the randomness of life. The New York Times quoted a fellow teacher, Richard Glasstone, who believed that he, along with Fred Astaire and Margot Fonteyn, had been the greatest dancers of the twentieth century.

Among the personal reminiscences was one that revealed how, even in the most ephemeral of art forms, the materialism of the Reagan years has seeped into people's evaluations of greatness. Alma Guillermoprieto remembers visiting him a few years before and noticing the shabby furniture. I'm sure Cunningham didn't care about furniture after his best friend, John Cage, died in 1992.

She also noted that the man she believed was the "greatest living creator of dance beauty and contemporary fusions of art forms...did not even own his own home." The lack of real estate didn't signify to Cunningham. Diminishment came from arthritis that robbed him of his ability to move. He was like Monet with his cataracts and Beethoven without his hearing, an artist bereft of his medium.

He himself said dance left nothing - no copyrights like those of Cage for companies to haggle over, no paintings like those of his collaborator, Robert Rauschenberg, for auction galleries to hype - "nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

Every dancer knows the song from Chorus Line, "What I did for Love," has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a single foot eternally suspended in the air, defying arthritis and death.

Notes:
Guillermoprieto, Alma. "Merce Cunningham," New Yorker website, 28 July 2009.

Macaulay, Alastair. "Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies," The New York Times website, 27 July 2009, includes quote by Cunningham and the photograph from "Antic Meet."