Film Review: CUNNINGHAM
Photo Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Merce Cunningham is inarguably one of the most iconic, original and influential contemporary dancers and choreographers of all time. Upon his death in 2009 at the age of 90, he left behind 200 dances and around 800 “Events” – site specific performances in all manner of unusual indoor and outdoor locations. His legacy is vibrant, audacious and well-documented. It is therefore fitting that Alla Kovgan rises to the occasion and gives as good as she gets. Filming in luminous 3-D, she opens with a dancer performing in a looming tunnel. The image is arresting, the movement impossibly fluid and feels perilous. Cunningham believed that the human body was capable of almost anything, and spent his life pushing those boundaries. This is an early Cunningham work staged and filmed by Ms. Kovgan posthumously.
© Mko Malkshasyan. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Focusing on the work created between 1942 and 1972 when he was mostly creating dances with his lifelong partner and collaborator, the composer John Cage. The two had compatible theories about art and the act of making it and they seemed not to care if anyone else understood it or liked it. Cage acknowledged that he made music intentionally estranged from reality. Merce refused to define his work as “avant-garde” or any other name, replying only “I don’t describe it. I do it” He did not call himself a choreographer, only allowing: “I am a dancer.”
However, he originated a style so unique that he had to develop his own dance technique. It is one hundred percent abstract. It is not based on moods, human emotions, states of mind, or even music. It is about bodies moving through space and the multitudinous possible ways that that can occur. It can be influenced by lines, forms, or randomness, like the I Ching. The work was strange and unfamiliar. They labored in obscurity for many long years until they began to have traction with the more open-minded European audiences, which eventually spread to the United States.
© Douglas Jeffrey. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The film is loaded with archival footage and recordings of Merce, being impenetrable and spare with his words when speaking about himself or his process. He does not give up much. There are many excerpted segments of backstage and onstage performances of some of his best known work as well as quotes from his collaborators, like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. All of the archival material is of the period and there are no out of sync talking heads included. The only contemporary footage is of the works staged by Ms. Kovgan, using drones to film dancers on the rooftop of a metropolitan high rise, a formal garden, or on a forest floor. It is very Merce-inflected with different technology - sublimely gorgeous and arrestingly dramatic.
© Mko Malkshasyan. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
What she has made is a portrait of an artist of the purest sort - fiercely pushing his art to the limits. This is not a simple medium. ”You are working with bodies which are deteriorating from the moment of their birth.” She worked on the film for seven years and filmed all of her dance sequences in only 18 days in multiple locations in Germany. Inspired by Wim Wenders’ film about Pina Bausch, there is so much visual beauty that you don’t even need to know or care about dance. But, if you do, this is a real bonanza.
