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out of its inner workings. Many, many works have been based upon its style. Modern-dance has been more reticent in this respect. Not for them works such as “Etudes” or “Ballet School.” To be true, Martha Graham in “Acrobats of God” once gave the world a primer of other artistic beliefs and technical messages, but no other work, I think, in modern-dance has concerned itself with its very own material until this season's production of “Second Hand.” The title is apparently derived from the Cage music. Cunningham had wanted to use some Satie music, which copyright difficulties made impossible. As a result, John Cage developed variations on its intention, if not its theme, which he has called, with due modesty, “Cheap Imitation.” The importance of the piece is that essentially it is an exercise of style—a statement of where Cunningham and the Cunningham dance style is here and now. it opens with a solo for Cunningham himself—a wild and weird solo that seems to sum up so much of the Cunningham canon, a cryptic encapsulation of many different dances. It proceeds with a typical Cunningham duet of the rose rather than black variety, and ends with a marvelously devised ensemble for the company, with a kind of dazzling, careless dexterity. Cunningham is always at his best when he is at his most casual. Sometimes he labors for coal dust but throws away diamonds. I have loved this last season by Cunningham. His easygoing intensity, his concentration on the very stuff of creation, his clarity and lack of any pretension give him a special power over our minds and hearts. Cunningham is really where our theater is at. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder whether our theater knows it. The New York Times, 18 January 1970 (Clive Barnes)

world of dance In a delightfully fey mood, Merce Cunningham opened his engagement earlier this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the last of five different companies to play two-week stands each during a ten-week Festival of Dance (the second) at the Academy. Sometimes Cunningham and his most con-

stant colleague, John Cage, avant-garde composer, can drive the ordinary onlooker right up the wall (which is very possibly their intent) with ear-shattering noises, eye-shattering lights, and kinetic non sequiturs, very often sullenly shared with the audience. We who attend dance frequently have seen Cunningham and his superbly trained company of dancers booed, hissed, and walked-out-on, very often justifiably. But the program selected for the opening of the Cunningham dancers’ two-week repertory season invited no such reception. There was self-indulgence and arrogance present there always is in Cunningham programs—but there was sweetness this time, plus those antic airs at which Cunningham excels. The premiere for opening night was Tread (a second new work came along later in the season) with music of Christian Wolff and décor by Bruce Nauman. The décor, incidentally, included ten floor-stand fans, some of them of the rotating type. These were placed along the footlights and directed at the audience. This would have been positively dreamy in summer at a nonair-conditioned theater, but in winter it didn’t help those with the sniffles who sat in range of the blasts. No matter. The fans served a sort of architectural purpose, and behind them ten dancers moved in a fascinating array of architectural and sculptural patterns. One of the special charms of Tread is the manner in which these designs are reached, altered, broken, transformed by the dancers themselves as they manipulate one another’s limbs, exchanging one linkage of male and female arms and legs with another arrangement. In this particular dance, there is nothing deadpan, nothing sullen about faces, Cunningham dances most of it with a mischievous grin and with the pranciness of a young goat, and the others share in the amusement provided by this nameless game. The cool, patrician, and beautiful Carolyn Brown, equipped with one of the finest dance techniques to be encountered anywhere, is Cunningham’s leading female dancer —in a way-out company, what would you call her, première danseuse cosmique? —and she was stunning in Tread. Excellent also were the other young women and men in this ten-member-troupe. A repeat from last season was Canfield, to a score (of sorts) by Pauline Oliveros. The title, of course, refers to the famous old game of solitaire, but one would be hard put to distinguish it, at least literally, through what the

dancers do. There are body juxtapositions and even overlappings, pauses and moves, figures turning up and disappearing, but this is no Jeu de Cartes with dancers enacting specific cards in the deck. Canfield is simply the starting point for very loosely related designs, tl is of the expressionless genre; so there is no gaiety about it, just cold images. There is no gaiety about the score either. It begins with John Cage and someone, 1 think, called Gene, who wanders back and forth at the back of the house, near the lobby, and is asked to change locations in order to achieve different effects. The dialogue, over loud-speakers, is not very interesting, sounding more like a preliminary “tech” rehearsal than anything. Later we are treated to some more extensive sound patterns, but these reach the bombast point and fall uncomfortably upon the ear. Eeveryone, however, moved expertly through Cunningham’s skeletal patterns. The closing piece also had dialogue in it, involving Mr. Cage and David Vaughan, but here the dialogue sparkled with the wit of a Sitwell, the wisecracks of a Cerf, and the zaniness of a Gertrude Stein. It is called How to Pass. Kick, Fall, and Run, and Cage, aside from performing, arranged the whole sound pattern, including the marvelous timing and mad intertwinings of the dialogue. This is also antic Cunningham, and his swift-as-mercury movements and his sly smile will remind long-time dance fans of his early days with Martha Graham when he vaulted onto the stage at the command. “Dear March, come in!” in Miss Graham’s Letter to the World, or bore a frustrated housewife into a sphere of dreams as Pegasus in Punch and the Judy. So if Cunningham & Co. can irritate, outrage, infuriate you from time to time and they definitely can they can also comfort, cajole, delight, and captivate you with the capers of the innocent and the wit of the sophisticate a lovely combination! This is what happened opening night 1970. And speaking of 1970, Harvey Lichtenstein, the Academy’s director, who planned and produced the ten-week 1969-70 Dance Festival, reports that the engagements of the American Ballet Theatre, Eliot Feld’s American Ballet Company (an idiot name if there ever was one, considering the well-established other troupes and schools with similar names), the Alvin Alley American Dance Theater, the Harkness Ballet, and Cunningham were so successful that a spring season, March-April, is in

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