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Cunningham, Balanchine, and Postmodern Dance

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01472520500538057

1532-4257

Sally Banes, Nöel Carroll,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes ∗ Throughout this essay, we are using the concepts of modernism and postmodernism descriptively rather than evaluatively. It is not our intention to insinuate that one style is necessarily superior to the other. Specifically, we are not suggesting that Cunningham's work is somehow less for not being postmodern. Furthermore, we are not advocating that choreographers today return to the concerns of the postmoderns. Indeed, we do not think this is remotely practicable. The contemporary danceworld is far too money conscious to brook the kind of experimentation that occurred at Judson Church in the 1960s. The postmoderns had nothing to lose, so they could be as subversive as their imaginations permitted. They did not try to secure grants from agencies demanding to know that they were serving a public commensurate with the funds they were receiving. They had no Boards of Trustees to answer to. They had no payrolls to meet. They had enough money to get by and little ambition to make more. This gave them the freedom to be as wild as they wished to be. There is probably an inverse ratio between professionalism and the risks a choreographer is willing to take. The danceworld has become highly professional since the days Judson; fledgling companies are savvy about nonprofit status and funding. In fact, dancers on every stratum of the food chain seem obsessed with money; go to a dance festival and all folks talk about. But if money weighs so heavily on the minds of choreographers, they scarcely likely to alienate potential audiences with material as "way out" as the postmoderns embraced. ∗ Something like this avant-garde is also identified by Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Bürger, however, seems to regard this as the only genuine avant-garde, whereas we regard it as but one variation. Ironically, just as Greenberg consigns the integrationist avant-garde to the pale of history, so Bürger, from the opposite direction, appears to demean the modernist (the autonomous) avant-garde. ∗Although Cunningham worked in Graham's company, he also was associated with Balanchine in a number of ways. Cunningham was one of six men in the corps of Balanchine's Ballet Imperial in its first New York showing—a five-day run starting on November 4, 1942, for the New Opera Company. Cunningham choreographed The Seasons for Ballet Society in 1947. Thus, it is not surprising that he sometimes sounds like Balanchine; see, for example, his denial that dance is abstract in Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, with Chronicle and Commentary by David Vaughan, ed. Melissa Harris (New York: Aperture, 1997), p. 44. ∗ Perhaps a similar experiment occurs in Balanchine's Monumentum pro Gesualdo when, after the pas de deux, the dancers walk off stage in a perfectly ordinary manner. ∗ Satisfyin' Lover involves a crowd of ordinary people crossing the performing space, walking as they might on any pubic thoroughfare. And with ordinary movement came ordinary bodies, bodies not tempered by dance class. That is, this use of vernacular movement heralded the advent of everyday bodies in the dance world including children (and even infants), the elderly, the heavyset, and eventually even the disabled. The postmodern celebration of ordinary bodies, then, paved the way for the influx of all sorts of different bodies onto the dance stage, making possible the intergenerational mixes in much community dance and also the Dancibility movement. In this way, postmodern dance has contributed concretely to the progress of emancipation by erasing the choreographic stigma that previously attached to nondancerly bodies. That is, postmodern dance was not only a symbol of egalitarian freedom, but also an instrument toward its achievement on the contemporary dance stage. For a discussion of postmodern dance and the themes of egalitarianism and freedom, see Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). †This piece, like other works performed at Judson and subsequent performances by The Grand Union, employs talking, thereby incorporating ordinary behavior into dance. The introduction of talking into the very design of the dance would be of great importance, especially from the 1980s onward, since talking is an almost indispensable element in dances concerned with identity and other sorts of politics. ∗ Nor was the exemplification of ordinary or pedestrian movement a preoccupation of Balanchine's, which is the reason why, despite the reflexivity of some of his abstract ballets, Balanchine is not feasibly construed to be a postmodern. He is a modernist rather than an integrationist in these cases and, therefore, neither a postmodern nor a postmodernist. ∗ This conclusion represents a modification and refinement of previous views of the authors, who in the past tended to associate the postmoderns with Greenbergian modernism. 1. Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1980). 2. See Noël Carroll, "The Concept of Postmodernism from a Philosophical Point of View," in International Postmodernism, ed. Douwe Foukkema and Hans Bertens (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1997). 3. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961). 4. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 5. David Michael Levin, "Balanchine's Formalism," in What Is Dance? ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 138. 6. Noël Carroll, "The Philosophy of Art History, Dance, and the 1960s," in Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible, ed. by Sally Banes (with Andrea Harris) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 95- 6. 7. Our discussion of Cunningham in this essay, including our description of his movement, has been deeply influenced by Roger Copeland's excellent book Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (London: Routledge, 2004). 8. Copeland, pp. 39–43. 9. Noël Carroll, "Cage and Philosophy," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 93–8. 10. For further descriptions of postmodern dances, see Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962–64 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). 11. Quoted in Beyond the Mainstream, directed by Merrill Brockway and produced by Merrill Brockway and Carl Carlson for Dance in America, WNET-TV, New York, May 21, 1980. Moreover, walking continued to be a constant in postmodern choreography into the 1970s, notably in some of the work of Lucinda Childs. 12. On the significance of ordinary movement for Rainer, see Noël Carroll, "Yvonne Rainer and the Recuperation of Everyday Life," in Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002, ed. by Sid Sachs (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, 2002), pp. 65–85. 13. Rauschenberg said, "A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric." Quoted in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life by Arthur Danto (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. ix. 14. Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (London: Routledge, 2004). Although our treatment of Cunningham's work is indebted throughout to this admirable book, there is one point where we do strongly disagree with Professor Copeland's views. In a provocative homologue, he associates Graham with abstract expressionism and Cunningham with the aesthetics of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. We think there are several errors here. If Cunningham's endeavor is distinct from that of abstract expressionism as characterized by Harold Rosenberg, his modernism is in sync with Pollock's as described by Clement Greenberg. Copeland associates Graham with abstract expressionism, but this also seems wrong. Insofar as Graham remains involved with stories about human characters, her dances are expressionist, maybe, but not abstract. Finally, Rauschenberg and Johns are integrationists by our lights. They do not belong to the same artistic camp as Cunningham does. Their contributions in their collaborations with Cunningham coexist with his, rather than reinforcing them, in a way parallel to Cage's contributions (as discussed above). Thus, we want to challenge Copeland's assimilation of Cunningham to Rauschenberg's project and, instead, align him with the modernist wing of abstract expressionism. 15. For the distinction between representation and exemplification as contrasting symbolic modes, see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, Ind: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).