Yale Dance Theater’s spring 2012 project on The Legacy of Merce Cunningham asks questions about the life and durability of a choreographer’s vision. Our inquiry applies the practice-as-research format of the dance studies courses, and expands upon YDT’s 2011 project on Twyla Tharp’s Eight Jelly Rolls, which explored the benefits and challenges of restaging a dance now entering its 41^st year (see Blog Entries 2011). This year’s Cunningham project ups the ante by introducing multiple dances, created in four different decades, staged by four generations of Cunningham dancers.

Connecting the details of the studio practice to larger philosophical questions about dance preservation, we start with the premise that a choreographer’s vision is housed partly within the dancers that participated in the creation and performance of his work. This is not to detract from the autonomy of Cunningham’s ideas, so much as to shift attention to the ways those ideas get filtered through his dancers’ individual experiences in the process of restaging the work. We’re grateful for the collected expertise of dancers Jennifer Goggans, Meg Harper, Neil Greenberg and Patricia Lent, and their enthusiasm for the Yale project. Their keen eyes, bodies and memories of working with Cunningham make up part of our research. Together, we will think about how generational knowledge might be synthesized in dance reconstruction, rather than contested, as it tends to be within the legacies of most major choreographers. In one example of taking into account different realities, in last week’s rehearsal, Meg and Jennifer shared two images of Merce: the dramatic dancer-choreographer with whom Meg worked, whose performing presence drove his dances into the 1970s, and the octogenarian artist Jennifer remembers, struggling to communicate ideas to his younger, able-bodied dancers of the 2000s. Both images are true, and the change impacted the evolution of his work. In this blog, the students of YDT reflect on these issues through their experience learning Cunningham’s choreography.

The present moment, of course, forces us to move one step further along this evolution, to fathom a world without Merce’s body, or presence, or even dances performed by his dancers. On December 28, 2011, I attended the dress rehearsal for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s final performances at the Park Avenue Armory. I stood on the platform overlooking the central stage for much of the run-through. The arrangement of the cavernous space fittingly represented layers of time, for the activity on the stages to the far right and left seemed from my vantage point like distant memories — recollected actions or gestures underlying the choreography happening in right front of me. The dancers went about their evening, beautifully dancing no less than sixty years worth of Merce’s hard-won, daily choreographic practice.

Afterward, I chatted briefly with Neil Greenberg. I told him that it felt like a memorial to me, and it made me sad. Neil replied that he didn’t feel that way at all. He thought he would, but actually he felt like what had happened was just art – art releasing into the universe – he gestured to indicate a puff of smoke rising and escaping into the air. That was all, art releasing into the universe, and he thinks that was what it was meant to be. Art happens. Life happens. We’re thinking of you, Merce Cunningham.