Top right John Cage (left) and Merce Cunningham in 1964 and (below) Cunningham today and above archivists John Kelly and David Vaughan
14 THE LIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 10- ?k‘ Aug; 1):)01
He may be 82 and in a wheelchair, but that’s not enough to stop MERCE CUNNINGHAM embark on an acting career. We went to France to meet the deity of modern dance. Words: Ellie Carr
ontpellier. 2001. Merce Cunningham — the most important living figure of 20th century modem dance — has just walked out onto the stage of the bunker-like Opera Berlioz theatre to take a post- performance bow. Nothing remarkable in that. He is the show's choreographer after all. The remarkable part is that he is 82-years—old and so crippled by arthritis that he is ordinarily confined to a wheelchair.
Cunningham makes this painful journey from wings to centre-stage because he has done so all his life. Tonight as he steps into the spotlight. the audience erupts into rapturous applause and a mass standing ovation ripples through the auditorium. As Andy Warhol‘s giant silver pillows — the stage set for Cunningham’s 1968 Rainfbrest — are tossed into the crowd and people scramble over each other to touch a silver sliver of history. the choreographer lifts his face into the stage-lights. He looks like the happiest man on earth.
Earlier that day I interviewed Cunningham in the basement of the modernist Opera Berlioz theatre. As I hover in the corridor. a succession of the impossibly long. poised dancers emblematic of the Cunningham style sweep past. then crashing through swing-doors in a wheelchair comes the choreographer as he is ferried to his dressing room. He is too tired to start the interview. So I wait.
In the interim. people flit in and out of his room. moving quietly and talking in hushed tones as if he were some statesman or tribal deity installed in his inner chamber. And of course to some. a deity is exactly what Cunningham is. It is he who overturned the natural order of dance in the 50s when he stripped it of narrative: used chance methods of
compositions such as I Ching dice or tossing coins to determine the order of steps and directions in space. and — perhaps most radical of all — refused to choreograph to music in the traditional manner and plonked often grating. minimalist scores onto his dances at the last minute instead. This — and the long wait — has led me to expect someone cantankerous. When I finally get to shake his hand he is disarmingly gentle and unfalteringly polite.
Sat now in his dressing room in the dancer’s uniform of baggy sweatpants and Reebok trainers he has wom his whole life. Cunningham is all ears. I am here to talk about his forthcoming visit to the Festival. where his moment under the spotlight will amount to considerably more than a curtain call. Not content with choreographing. taking rehearsals. developing his choreographic software Lifefarms and touring with his company. the octogenarian New Yorker has taken on the not inconsiderable challenge of playing Erik Satie in the stage premiere of James Joyce. Marcel Duchamp. Erik Satie: An Alphabet. by his late lover and artistic partner. the minimalist composer John Cage.
‘l'm not coming as a dancer.’ he says. eyes lighting up at the thought of this new treat. ‘I‘m coming as an actor.‘ Written and perfomied as a radio play in 1982. this intriguing collage of overlapping text and soundscore (the first airing of score left in manuscript by Cage) is something of a living archive — featuring as it does both real and imagined lines from figures such as Satie. Marcel Duchamp. James Joyce and Mao Tse Tung and a cast that includes Cunningham as well as his archivist David Vaughan and John Cage's archivist John Kelly who plays the show's narrator.