Original subtitles

♪♪♪

I never was interested in dancing that referred

fo a mood, or a feeling, or in a sense,

expressed the music.

So that the dancing does not refer.

It is what it is.

It's that whole visual experience.

♪♪♪

Out. Stretch.

Two, down and down.

Up. Yeah. Step.

Hold. Hold. Hold.

♪♪♪

Tonight, the world of dance welcomes Merce Cunningham.

He has asked us not to call him an avant-garde choreographer,

or a modern dance choreographer.

So I'm going to ask him what we may call him.

Well, I'm a dancer.

That says everything?

Well, that's sufficient for me.

♪♪♪

Since my dancers and I are a group of human beings,

we are that on the stage,

as we are in real life,

people moving around in various ways.

But we don't interpret something.

We present something, we do something,

and then any kind of interpretation is left

up to anybody looking at it in the audience.

My idea about movement is that any movement

is possible for dancing.

That ranges all the way from nothing, of course,

up to the most extended kind of movement

that one might think up.

Your background is in modern dance,

is it, Merce Cunningham?

Yes.

Now, did you evolve a technique of your own?

Well, physically or technically,

I was interested in extending

movement possibilities as I saw them.

I thought that a ballet technique for the legs

was astonishing, and I thought many things in the modern dance

were remarkable for the torso.

And so I tried to find ways to combine those

to make a body which was flexible and pliant

and allowed for as many movement possibilities

as I could see.

Dance exercises over dancers an insidious attraction

that makes them work hours daily

at perfecting an instrument

which is really deteriorating from birth.

To what end this eternal daily struggle?

Because inside of all that is an ecstasy.

Brief perhaps, not always released,

but when it is, like a moment in balance

when all things great and small coincide.

This can happen at any moment,

and when it does for a dancer,

he can smile without knowing it.

There is no guarantee of this, but it does exist.

We see it, and we know it.

Myself, I don't think of discipline as, like, rules.

I think of discipline as being something private,

which, in the case of a dancer,

he realizes that the discipline,

say, of going to class, is part of his life.

He arrives at this point within himself.

It's more like meditation, devotion, I think,

than anything else.

♪♪♪

I went to school in Seattle, Washington,

and Mr. Cage was there,

and he taught us a composition class.

And it was so remarkable, I never forgot this.

The next year, I went to New York,

and Mr. Cage joined eventually.

So he's been writing music for me ever since.

♪♪♪

People have, um, often defended art

on the grounds that life was a mess,

and that, therefore, we needed art

in order to escape from life.

I would like to have an art that was so, uh, bewildering,

complex, and, uh, illogical that we would return

to everyday life with, uh, great pleasure.

♪♪♪

There is no such thing

as silence.

I have nothing to say,

and I am saying it.

And that is poetry

as I need it.

First time I met Merce Cunningham,

he was touring the States with John Cage.

I'd never seen anyone move like that,

from such a quiet center,

with such animal authority and human passion.

Merce Cunningham's doctor used to be Dr. Lotman.

Dr. Lotman's the one who prescribed

Merce's vitamin pills and breakfast powders.

He told Merce to sit when he didn't have to stand,

to lie down when he didn't have to sit,

and to sleep whenever he could sleep.

Possessed of an active disposition,

Cunningham keeps busy even when he's sitting.

With pen or pencil he makes calendars,

circling the days involving performances

or other engagements.

One calendar finished, he starts another.

For years, sitting at the breakfast table,

he taught himself Russian.

This enabled him to speak in their language to members

of the Bolshoi Ballet before performing

with his company for them.

Having learned to knit, he knitted

the many-colored costume he wears in "Lavish Escapade."

I simply decided years ago that I would make

a dance free of the music.

And then we would put the sound and the dance together.

Then, actually, you have never heard his music,

and has he seen your dance? - No.

And the night of the performance,

you will combine the two?

With any luck.

What, then, reactions have you had to that?

Well, all the way from absolute stupefaction

on the part of an audience to, uh...

to people liking it very much.

♪♪♪

When I began to work with dancers

who were trained in other techniques,

it didn't function for me.

So I decided that maybe if I could teach...

♪♪♪

I must say the first class I gave,

There was one person who showed up,

a wonderful Marianne Preger-Simon,

who said, "Well, will you give the class?"

And I said yes. So I began.

I've always felt,

during the time when I worked with him,

although he was giving out

all of the activity that we did,

there was a great space for you to do it yourself.

I think that Merce was interested

in what could be considered our flaws as dancers.

And he hesitated to correct us

unless he just got irritated by what he saw.

I think he was much more of an artist

rather than a teacher

who was going to try to get us to do things

up to some perfect and ideal standard.

- I - found I was doing things

that I never dreamed were possible.

And the world was opening up in a whole way

that I hadn't understood.

The thing that's so hard about working with Merce

is that he demands that you are first of all yourself

as a human being,

and from that, a dancer.

And you move on it?

Yes. There again, you can walk up or not.

I myself never liked that competitive thing

that so much of dancing seemed to me to have,

so I never tried to do that in my own situation.

I went on the assumption that each dancer was a person

who had certain abilities.

I would attempt to let each of the dancers

find out for himself how he danced,

what kind of a person he was in that situation.

It's not politics, it was dancing,

but that's as reasonable a place to do that

as any other situation.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

In the early '50s,

that point that my company, So to speak, began.

I didn't form it. It just began.

We just sort of got together and tried to keep together.

That's all there is to it.

Suddenly, there's a company of three people,

or eight people, or 60 people,

I don't think it matters, it's only in proportion.

Then you have to consider all of those people

in all the ways. The fact that they are people,

they must somehow get from day to day, you know,

and have some place to sleep, something to eat, all of that.

And all of that has to be taken into consideration,

as well as the fact that you are now

not only responsible for making a dance for yourself,

but for these other dancers too.

And that implies something about clothing, heh,

covering them up some way,

something about music, however you think of that,

and all that gets more...

involves more funds, one way or another.

But you do it, don't you?

The way you function?

Yes. You find a way to function or you quit.

Yes, of course.

What do you do during rehearsal?

- How does this all happen? - We rehearse,

and then I will keep track via stopwatch

of a given section.

One of the pieces that we used to do was "Suite for Five,"

and we could go several months without rehearsing that dance,

and then do it and we would come out within,

oh, at the most, 10 seconds difference.

Merce's way of working with a stopwatch,

which so shocked the modern dance world,

led to the company's reputation of being cold, inhuman,

impassive, expressionless automatons.

It seemed to me that, in the society around us,

there were so many scientific possibilities coming up

that one did not have to think

in terms of one thing following another,

but, say, in a field.

And I began to make dances

with those possibilities in mind.

So to speak, compositional method

was by using chance, or random means.

If I don't like what comes up with the chance procedures,

do I then throw it away?

In other words, do I let my taste

enter this thing?

And I, uh, don't.

I try it out.

Our audiences were artists.

The great American painters,

they were just becoming well-known.

They were still poor.

Well, the people who really seemed to accept my work

were dancers and musicians,

while I was considered a clown by nearly everyone else.

And, uh, I found a lot more rapport

with, uh, their ideas

about what, uh, art was

than I did with a lot of painters.

We became friends immediately.

We understood, without speaking,

how the other one felt.

Almost a sense of identity.

♪♪♪

Bob Rauschenberg described it once,

he said we have only two things in common,

our ideas and our poverty. Ha-ha-ha.

I thought that was a marvelous description.

And it brought us together.

Merce is not the easiest person to work with

in the first place. He hates sets.

He hates costumes.

So I mean, you really have to work around

without his even noticing.

I said, "Bob, I want to wear a chair on my back"

in one of the dances. He looked at me,

and then a few minutes later he said:

"If you have a chair, can I have a door?"

And I said, "Certainly. Why not?"

One of the most amazing things about our collaboration

was sort of a carte-blanche trust,

where nobody is really responsible,

but as a group of people, are not irresponsible.

And I think that creates a kind of a wonderful feeling

about the possibilities of society.

I don't know what will happen

until it's put, let's say, in the first performance.

I prefer to risk, so to speak, to chance that,

that this combination of things,

some of which I don't know about,

may produce something else.

I used to be so jealous of John

because John couldn't do anything wrong,

but making costumes and sets...

I was always in the furniture business,

and you can trip overeither the set or the costumes.

But you can't trip on a note.

Well, in "Summerspace,"

all I said was that the dance didn't have any center.

- I - knew what you meant.

There was gonna be just as much dancing in the wings.

So I planned a kind of a camouflage.

So if anybody hesitated,

they were lost in the background.

We worked on "Summerspace" today.

In Summerspace,

the principal momentum was the concern

for steps that carry one through space.

Like the passage of birds

stopping for moments on the ground,

and then going on,

or automobiles throbbing along turnpikes

and under and over clover leaves.

The dance came out to have a great deal of turning in it,

which was upsetting to the dancers.

"I can't turn."

"How do you turn?"

The only way to do it is to do it.

I continued to work out the dance

every day after teaching,

with all of us growing wearier as the weeks went on.

And we presented it on a Sunday matinee,

in the spot costumes

and against the pointillist backdrop

by Robert Rauschenberg,

and with the graph music by Morton Feldman.

The audience was puzzled.

♪♪♪

When we started, we didn't want to simply stay in New York

and give one program maybe in a small theater,

and then hope for the rest of the year

to pay it off, and so on.

So we began to drive.

The Cunningham Company used to make

transcontinental tours

in a Volkswagen Microbus.

Once, when we drove up to a gas station in Ohio,

and the dancers, as usual, all piled out

to go to the toilets and exercise around the pumps.

The station attendant asked me

whether we were a group of comedians.

I said, "No. We're from New York."

The real collaboration

was all getting into that Volkswagen bus.

I had to sit next to the driver when we played Scrabble.

Until Carolyn Brown's husband said that she would have

to leave the company if we didn't stop playing Scrabble

while we drove looking for mushrooms.

It was fun too.

It was horrible too.

But that's what we could do, so we did it.

John...

It's been eaten up by animals.

Hypholomaornaematoloma, and they are changing the name.

There are nine of you chugging along from one place

to another, and, uh, they were very tribal.

And John was incredibly generous all the time.

He organized these lovely picnics and...

In those days, we had our food and lodgings paid for

and got 25 dollars a performance, and that was it.

On top of which they said the music was impossible.

And there was a lady who wrote to say that she had come

to New York from a distance, and that in order to do that

she had had to employ a babysitter.

And they printed this in the paper.

The critic printed it.

And that when she got there,

what she saw and what she heard

was so bad, you see,

that she had, so to speak,

been cheated out of all this money...

The ticket, the train ticket, and the babysitter.

And then the critic added that we had no right

to treat people in this cruel fashion.

♪♪♪

When you and Cage were first touring together

during those early years, did you have enough belief

in what you were doing to not be discouraged

by the negative reactions?

The only thing for me is that

I really am deeply fond of dancing.

So no matter how dire the situation was,

how desperate, I would wake up one day

and start to work and suddenly realize

that it was just as interesting as it always had been,

regardless of the circumstances.

But we also, as we toured,

we began to have friends... Not many.

But every place there would be a few people

who would be very interested in what we had done.

♪♪♪

What's gratifying to a dancer, really,

is performing, more than... More than anything else.

Rehearsal has a certain class, has a certain kind

of gratification, but not, you know,

not as much as performing, and we do it so little.

And then when it's over, what is there?

You know, you go back to your solitary flat,

and your horrible job,

and there's nothing.

I never thought that's what it's about.

I think the real thing is the fact that you continue,

that you keep on doing things,

because it isn't about the money,

or not having money, or...

anything like that, it's about making something.

How do you make a movement alive, technique or not?

How do you keep in the dancing, however long studied,

practiced, and repeated, that spontaneous act

the stance of a cat can give you?

It is for me a question of faith

and a continuous belief

in the surprise of the instant.

Put aside fatigue, aches,

injuries to the body and the psyche.

Let the shape and the time of a single or multiple action

take its weight and measure.

It will be expressive.

My first recollection of "Crises"

was Merce was making for himself

all these wonderful solos.

I mean, they were mad

and lots of dramatic stuff in them,

and we never got to do that.

And Viola and I said, “In the next piece

we want to be witches." And that's what he made.

♪♪♪

People take Merce at his word.

They absolutely believe him that it's only steps

that he's putting on the stage, but it isn't true.

It's not a dance of two people.

I mean, the women do certain things,

but all of the, uh, real action

is initiated by him.

I'm picked up and carried,

and it's also very little face to face.

That's very much true, I think,

in almost all of the duet things.

♪♪♪

/f I were to go to him and say, "Merce",

what does this... This exotic fall that Gus and I do mean?

"What's it supposed to mean?" You know?

He'd snort and turn his back.

He'd take it away from us.

He'd say, don't do it.

Which side are you going to go to?

All right, hold on, hold on. Hold on.

Just down, that's it. That's all.

Is that all right?

Now turn, Gus. That's right, so that way, Gus.

That's fine.

Now, Sandra, let go. Take your arms away.

That's right. Now, excuse me...

Now curve your trunk.

Give me this arm. Bring it right up.

That's it.

Unfortunately, it doesn't come

ever with any clear understanding

as to why you are or are not being included, except that...

Merce is like a painter,

and we're all like different colors.

And he wants some colors, and other times, he doesn't.

♪♪♪

I think there's a great sense of love

within the company, one for the other, and, uh...

Merce isn't able to express that... openly,

but after a while you sense it.

He never expresses it openly?

Not really... no.

♪♪♪

San Francisco.

4 From dusk till dawn ♪

♪ I've got another world Of delusion... T

In "Winterbranch," the general idea was darkness.

- It was all about violence. - I'm interested

to hear you say it was about violence

because I think, on the whole,

you don't like these interpretations.

You see, this piece

by the combination of the elements

produces this violent display,

but the kind of violence it produces

is special to each spectator.

One was race riots, and one was atomic bomb,

and one was concentration camps,

and on and on.

The most violent reaction we received from it was New York.

It was before there was a great deal of violence

in the United States.

And now we do it and people no longer take it

as being violent because they know

there might be violence when they go out in the street

or even in the seat next to them.

♪♪♪

Now, this world tour

that you just came back from, tell us about it.

Well, we started in Strasbourg and we ended in Tokyo.

And in between was Paris and Venice

and Vienna and cities in Germany,

and a month in London and Stockholm.

Then we went to Poland,

and then we went to Czechoslovakia.

We were the first Western dancers to come there.

And we played in a hall with 3000 people.

♪♪♪

But you arouse such controversy that all audiences

don't greet you the same way, do they, Merce?

How do you say that what was the audience like?

Everybody in the audience is different.

They may all dislike it.

Dislike it for different reasons.

No more music!

Stop music! MAN: I've got in my mind

a kind of point of view of the world,

and I see a kind of arrow advancing,

and I see Rembrandt's doing something,

Michelangelo's doing something,

and then John Cage did something.

I want to go further, of course. It's natural.

This is Renaissance point of view,

a European point of view,

that everything's going in a single line.

And we're not going in a single line.

- We're in a field. - Yeah...

And you can also enter into the field.

♪♪♪

We were held over in London.

- Yes. - Somehow,

Merce screwed up, and they liked us.

Almost ruined our reputation!

♪♪♪

Mr. Sarabhai from Ahmadabad in India,

after seeing a performance by the Cunningham Company,

asked Merce

whether his dancing was popular in the United States.

Merce explained that programs were given principally

in universities and colleges.

Mr. Sarabhai said, "That isn't what I mean."

Do people do it after dinner?”

Oh, God.

Six months with the same group

of 20 people is hard.

Anyway, when Bob left, this was a time

when communication was particularly poor

between dancers and Merce.

We were kind of scared of what was going on,

because Merce was very distressed

and had the responsibility of the whole thing,

and was dancing gorgeously the whole time.

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

Oh, it's beautiful. It really is.

Oh! It's infinite

because it goes in with the sky.

Oh, it is fantastic.

One of the strengths of this great company

is its ability to draw to itself

as full-time collaborators top visual and musical artists,

like Cage, Warhol, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Mr. Johns cuts the finishing touches into the costumes,

and Andy Warhol's silver pillows

wander the stage cloud-like, looking for a home.

Do you consider your work avant-garde?

Well, I never use the word about myself.

But you would then say that yours is new dance.

How would you describe it?

Well, no, I don't describe it. I do it.

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

Do it with me. Step right, left, right, left.

Bah, bah. Leg, back, turn up, down.

One, four, seven, eight.

Three, four, six.

Sweetie, anything I'm doing is probably wrong.

No, it's nothing.

And one, two, three, one, two, three,

four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,

17, 18, 19, 22.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,

17, 18, 19, 23.

Six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 1314, 15, 16, 17,

18, 19, 24.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14,

15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 26.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,

17, 18, 19, 20, stop. All right?

Sometimes I think the urge to communicate

more directly with you is fairly strong in the dancers,

- but they hold it back. - Yes.

Which puts them into some kind of a conflict.

They have to deal with the situation,

and they have to figure so much out for themselves.

Excuse me. Um.

I think that's what I gamble on. Heh.

What you gamble on? Yes, yes.

That is, it's toward the good

rather than the bad, heh-heh-heh.

I know that doesn't always work.

Uh...

But I rather think it works

more times than it doesn't.

That is, by putting somebody in a situation

where they have to make a decision about something,

is what it amounts to, rather than

being dependent upon a kind of

now you do this, then you do this,

and then you do this, and then you do this.

Excuse me, I must go upstairs.

Aware of the many activities

connected with The Cunningham Dance Foundation Incorporated,

Jim Klosty asked Merce

whether he felt like a patriarch.

Two thousand dollars from the contractor.

Our $5869 and 90 cents,

giving us thus a net

of $23,355 and 10 cents from the benefit.

Merce said, "No",

I feel like a bystander who's been trapped.”

♪♪♪

- I - never believed that idea

that dancing was the greatest of the arts.

There are too many low things in it.

Too many feet to take care of,

a great deal of sweat and plain labor.

♪♪♪

But when it clicks, there's the rub.

It becomes memorable,

and one can be seduced all over again.

♪♪♪

♪♪♪

The age difference between Merce and his company

was not that great in the '50s, as it is now.

So that the family aspect of the early years

is missing, I think.

And they don't share their lives in the same way.

They don't eat together, um, play together.

There was a human being there, a more total person on stage,

and we were different from one another,

and he saw those differences.

And I think, today he's interested

in orchestrating a large company of dancers.

And in most of the new pieces,

they function as a group, as a company.

♪♪♪

Merce has been working so long now,

that some very fine dancers who used to dance with him,

Carolyn Brown, for instance, and Viola Farber,

and more recently, Valda Setterfield, have left.

And at the present moment, the company

is, uh, almost entirely new,

and yet it's magnificent.

That's because you have to allow for everybody.

Every single person has a possibility.

So what I do is not to imitate Carolyn, but to try some way

to find something that simply allows each person

to be what they are,

and if I'm lucky, it will happen.

But I trust that.

♪♪♪

- I - would just like to say

that I'm very grateful for the dancers in my company,

and the way they have put up with me...

...and all the things that we have done together.

I think they have responded marvelously.

♪♪♪