You are on page 1of 15

Fixing Dance: The Merce Cunningham Legacy Project

By Rebecca Pappas
Dancing gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no
paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to
be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you
feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.
-Merce Cunningham
The Legacy Project
In 2009 Merce Cunningham and the Merce Cunningham Dance
Foundation announced the first of its kind Legacy Project. The project
was an attempt to prepare for the ongoing life of Merce
Cunninghams works and company following his death, which, came
just six weeks after the announcement.
The project consisted of three major parts:
a) The Legacy Tour A two-year world tour during which the
company would, and has, performed a wide variety of Mr.
Cunninghams older and recent works, including a number of
New York performances, which Mr. Cunningham hoped, would
cost only $10.
b) Dance Capsules - A massive archiving project involving the
creation of digital capsules for as many of Cunninghams
major works as possible. These capsules, which are currently
being created, will be, a digital package containing complete
documentation of a Cunningham work, including performance
videos, sound recordings, lighting plots, dcor images, costume
design, production notes, and interviews with dancers and
artistic staff (www.merce.org 2012). These capsules will then
be licensed (along with certified re-constructors) for a fee to
professional companies or schools who want to learn and
restage Cunningham works.

c) The Termination of the Cunningham Company - After the world


tour, the Cunningham Company would, and has, been disbanded
and the rights of the works have passed over to the Merce
Cunningham Trust. The dancers and musicians were to have
been given a year of severance pay as well as assistance in
career transition. AUTHORS NOTE: I can find no information as
to whether or not this last part of the plan has been carried out.
It should be noted that Merce Cunningham was one of the most
important and innovative modern dance choreographers of the 20th
and 21st Centuries. Until his death at age ninety he was breaking
ground conceptually, technically, and technologically. He is famous for
decoupling dance from music and meaning, making over 150 works
(www.merce.org 2012) that he presented as being about nothing other
than the experience of dancing.
The Legacy Project is an unprecedented attempt to control and
curate the remembering of a choreographer and his/her works. For a
field that is just over one hundred years old, just passing the four
generation mark that Marianne Hirsch and Jan Assmann identify as
the edge of communicative memory (Hirsch 2008:110), this sort of
planned disappearance is a fascinating and important step. Mr.
Cunningham is the first major choreographer to make formal
provisions for his continuance.
In this paper I will examine the Legacy Project, particularly the
dance capsules, in relationship to the idea of the archive and the
repertoire and to the transmission of memory through technique and

tradition. I will also present, via Andre Lepecki, another possible


model for a corporeal archive.
Saving Merce
In Diana Taylors book, The Archive and the Repertoire, she
posits the idea that the archive and the repertoire stand in contrast to
one another. The archive collects and stores the material remnants of
human existence, and the repertoire, the sum total of our
performative acts. While the archive is constituted of maps, letters,
pottery shards, photos, CDs, and VHS cassettes, the repertoire is
where we dance and sing, tell stories and share meals. Taylor argues
that the archive is perpetually trying to subdue the repertoire. A
colonizing force, the archive attempts to fix the repertoire, recording
it and supplanting it even as the archive justifies its labor with terms
like, preservation. The repertoire, representing what is, often, a
non-Western way of knowing, finds itself pushed aside, replaced and
disappeared by the archive (Taylor 2003: 1-19).
In Taylors schema, the Legacy Project, particularly the dance
capsules, are an archive replacing a repertoire. Live performative
acts, danced by bodies, and transmitted person to person, are
replaced with static archives. This is a fear present whenever we try
to save dance. When one reads David Vaughn, the Merce
Cunningham company archivist for over 50 years, it is striking how
absent humans are from his discourse:

The Cunningham archives now contain as complete a collection


of programmes of performances of his work as I have been able
to assemble. The collection of press clippings goes back to the
early 1940s; there is an alphabetical (by author) card file of
these and of books in which Cunninghams work is discussed.
Archival photographs are filed alphabetically by dance titles
There is a chronological card file on performances; another lists
dances alphabetically on each card the dates and places of all
performances of the work are listed. There are also collections
of flyers and posters and other documentsThere is a
descriptive inventory of costumes from dances no longer in the
repertory, with photographs of some of the more unusual
costumes, modeled by students (Vaughn 1984: 66-67).
What stands out from this quote, besides the quaint mention of
bygone archiving technology, is the lack of people and bodies in
Vaughns vision of the past. It is a true archive, in Taylors sense,
because it constitutes the past through objects and documents.
Arrested in space, devoid of humanness, the capsule project, almost
thirty years later, also presents a rigid vision of dances and their
legacy. While the capsules are not yet complete, the language on the
company websitea digital package containing complete
documentation of a Cunningham work, (www.merce.org 2012)
implies a fixed notion of what each dance was in the past and what it
will be in the future.
Vaughns interest is in culling, controlling, and curating the
archive. In contrast, Sarah Whatley, a dance historian working on the
creation of a digital archive for prominent British choreographer
Siobhan Davies, discusses their desire to create overflowing records
that lend themselves to free interpretation. They want to include as
4

much material as possible multiple versions of performances,


rehearsal footage never meant for public consumption, items that
complicate and expand, rather than define and shut down the possible
meanings of works (Whatley 2008: 251). Whatley, quoting a
conversation with Davies, suggests that the choreographer wants to
create a situation where the viewer is essentially choreographing
the digital archive, making their way through an abundance of
material to construct their own meaning and narrative (Whatley 2008:
255). For Davies and Whatley the openness of the archive is key. The
Cunningham capsules on the other hand seem to pre-determine the
story attached to each dance work. In addition, there is contrast in
who their creators imagine will access each archive. While Whatley
states that open access is key to hers and Davies archiving project
(Whatley 2008: 255), the dance capsules are aimed at those who pay
handsomely to license and reperform a work (www.merce.org 2012).
They exist to ensure that each reperformance is as true to the
original as possible.
The question of how dance is remembered is an ongoing
conundrum. Video documentation, only widely available since the late
1960s, complicates the remembering. It means we must decide which
is the version of a dance that may have been performed 10s or 100s of
times. We must choose the cast, the venue, and the rendition that will
enter the historical record. Is the year to which we assign a dance the

year it was created or the year it first premiered? Questions abound


as we try to pin a spinning dancer to an inert page.
In her exhaustive memoir about her years dancing with the
Cunningham Company, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with
Cage and Cunningham, Carolyn Brown discusses the changing nature
of dance repertoire. When she sees dancers dancing pieces she
originated twenty years earlier she is struck by the changes in nuance
that have taken place over time. While the contemporary dancers are
technically stronger than she and her original cohort, she feels that
the meanings and subtleties of the choreography have shifted
dramatically over time (Brown 2007: 461). This evolution brings to
mind Taylors observation that the content of the repertoire changes
even as its meaning stays the same. She argues that objects in the
archive, on the other hand, tend to remain static while their social
significance is radically transformed (Taylor 2003: 20).
Applying Taylors model, the Cunningham Legacy endeavor falls
squarely into the realm of archive, a colonizing project that is
disappearing and replacing the lived experience of a dance and its
dancers (Taylor 2003: 41). One wonders, if, because dance is a
discipline that has been so consistently ignored by the Academy, with
no scores to read and no objects to buy, the Legacy Project is a call for
legitimacy and attention. The tone of the whole endeavor seems to be
oriented around placing Mr. Cunningham on par with major authors,

composers, and visual artists whose work can be more easily stored,
disseminated, and studied into the future. If dance and the repertoire
were seriously analyzed in their own right, there might not be such a
need to turn ourselves into archives.
Practice Makes Perfect
Prior to this contemporary impulse to archive, dance has
historically been passed body to body. In her history of ballet, Apollos
Angels, Jennifer Homans writes:
Memory is central to the art, and dancers are trained, as the
ballerina Natalia Makarova once put it, to eat dances to
ingest them and make them part of who they are. These are
physical memories; when dancers know a dance they know it in
their muscles and bonesThus ballet repertory is not recorded
in books or libraries; it is held instead in the bodies of the
dancers (Homans 2010: xix).
Technique has, classically, been the tool for transmitting this memory.
As an archive, technique contains and organizes the traces and
residues dance leaves behind, and out of which it forms againIt is
what Paul Connerton calls an inscribing practice (Hamera 2002:
65). In daily technique class the values and memories of a form are
passed down through repetition and discipline. In her article, An
Answerability of Memory: Saving Khmer Classical Dance, Judith
Hamera suggests that technique turns the body into an archive for a
dance form and consequently a set of cultural memories. Hamera
bridges the gap between the archive and the repertoire by theorizing
that dance causes the body to become a manuscript of cultural

experience. A dancer that she interviews compares the massacre of


dancers within the Khmer Rouge regime to the killing of books
(Hamera 2002: 76) suggesting that it is within dancers bodies that
the most important memories of a culture are stored and then
transmitted.
In her article, Practicing Tradition: History and Community in
an Appalachian Dance Style, Anne Elise Thomas looks at this memory
storage within the frame of tradition, offering a definition that sounds
a lot like technique. She states that tradition is an encompassing
system of people, practices and processes and is also synonymous
with culture (Thomas 2001: 164). Technique too, transmits a
worldview and culture and this definition could apply to many specific
dance forms including Graham, Limon, Ballet, Jazz, or Cunningham
itself. Like traditional practices such as clogging, which, is the
subject of Thomas article, modern dance technique happens in
community. Dancers regularly come together to re-vivify a set of
corporeal values. Daily technique class slowly changes over time,
entrenching ideas about the body but also reflecting cultural shifts.
Like Thomas vision of tradition, dance technique and community are
mutually reinforcing ideals that build on one another (Thomas 2001:
166).
It is within the daily tradition of technique class that company
members and aspirants gather to embody Mr. Cunninghams values. It

is here that we physically experience his interest in uneven rhythms


and counter-intuitive coordinations. Without daily practice of his
rigorous technique it is hard to imagine a dancer able to physically or
artistically approach his repertoire. His body of work was built upon
and is perpetuated within communal practice, and for many this is
where the work comes to life. It is clear, as one reads Carolyn
Browns book that his company was, for many years, a community of
practice, whose hallmarks are mutual engagement, a joint enterprise
and a shared repertory of activities, symbols and artifacts that provide
resources for continued production of meaning (Wegner in Thomas
2001: 173).
Yet in the original Legacy Plan there was no provision for
training, ongoing practice, lived tradition or community. The openended nature of class, its focus on community and transmission, and
its unglamorous daily nature, all make it poorly suited to an archive
focused on producing and preserving the product of the past. Dance
class falls squarely into Diana Taylors repertoire and, as such, is
disappeared by the archive.
It was not until recently that the Cunningham Foundation began
to make provisions for ongoing classes in Merce Cunningham
technique, now moving from Westbeth, the storied home for arts
which housed his studio and company for decades, to venues such as
City Center, Mark Morris Dance Center, and DNA where Cunningham

is one of a variety of techniques or traditions offered (www.merce.org


2012). Even in this movement we see a diluting of the shared practice
of his technique. Here the class becomes less its own tradition and
worldview, and more one physical technique among many. It is the
culture of dance as a whole that takes over rather than the individual
idiosyncrasies of the Cunningham technique. Once again in the
making of the plan the dance objects were privileged over the
techniques of the body.

10

Haunting Solutions
In discussing memory and Cambodian dance technique, Judith
Hamera provocatively suggests that technique can be a haunting,
replacing the individual body with an ideal body that disappears
personal narratives and tragedies and simultaneously reveals cultural
histories (Hamera 2002: 77). In her article she is concerned with how
technique is carried forward even in the face of the immense personal
and cultural trauma of the Khmer Rouge. She suggests that only the
body could carry on this work of transmission in a culture where
documentation and writing might equal entrapment or death (Hamera
2002: 70). Yet, I think this model of haunting is instructive for our
inquiry as well.
In dance practice and performance we are giving our bodies
over, allowing an idea or person larger than ourselves to enter us and
carry us through the heightened state of performance. Carolyn Brown
articulates this feeling of possession in her memoir and reviewers
reference it frequently in discussing a wide variety of dance works.
What if this possession, rather than the costumes or programmes or
inert legacies of performances was what was carried forward as the
key to remembering dances and dance makers? This is the case in
many non-western tradition, where remembering is recognized as an
explicitly performative act and certain individuals are endowed with

11

the task. Why cant it also be taken up as a model for Western concert
dance?
I want to end by discussing Andre Lepeckis article, The Body as
Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances, which presents
a contrasting notion of what an archive can be. He defies Taylors
bifurcation between a dead archive and a living repertoire,
establishing the body itself as an archive that defies fixity. The body,
Lepecki states, can be an archive that contains, and occurs at, the
moment of convergence between the past and the presents. It is an
archive that celebrates the disappearance, fallibility and decay of
humanness rather than the enduring nature of the material world. In
its constitutive precariousness, perceptual blind-spots, linguistic
indeterminations, muscular tremors, memory lapses, bleedings, rages,
and passions, the body as archive re-places and diverts notions of
archive away from a documental deposit or a bureaucratic agency
dedicated to the (mis)management of the past (Lepecki 2010: 34).
Lepecki is suggesting that a bodily archive can be a truer and more
complicated way of storing and re-storing performance, than a
traditional one.
He proposes that in re-performance and restaging we can
return to and grow the creative possibilities that works presented
when they were first created. Rather than planting a work in the past
and using an archive to preserve it, or even restaging it with an eye to

12

authentically recreating what it was, Lepecki offers the possibility that


we can re-engage works in a creative and constitutive present. In fact,
these re-performed works, he argues, may even preserve and deepen
the ontology of past works in a way that orthodox reconstructions or
conventional archives never could. They are a chance to access nonexhausted creative fields of impalpable possibilities (Massumi in
Lepecki 2010: 31).
His analysis of Richard Move performing Martha Graham is
particularly instructive, as the controversy and litigation surrounding
Grahams works after her death in 1991 is part of what inspired the
Legacy Project. Richard Move is a drag performer who began
performing an over-the-top impersonation of Martha Graham at a
nightclub called Mother in New York City in 1996 (Lepecki 2010: 40).
These performances became increasingly popular and the show
became increasingly famous. What began as a spoof turned into an
uncanny and meaningful conjuring of Marthas spirit. According to
Lepecki it was as if Move was haunted, bringing to life and unleashing
erotic and dramatic forces not realized by even Graham herself.
Between 2000-2004 a legal battle halted the performance of all
of Grahams works by her company and heirs. Move was the only
person performing her work and became a lieux de memoire where
Grahams complicated legacy could be experienced and stored.
Moves own system of transformation, composed by both dragging

13

and re-enacting, was creating, away from the institutional struggles


over Grahams corpse, a powerful corporeal and affective archive an
archive that could unleash Marthas voice as well as her body,
presence, dance eroticism, creativity and works (Lepecki 2010: 42).
In Lepeckis article Move talks of being filled up by Marthas spirit,
and Lepecki mentions that Marthas collaborators and friends began
to tell Move intimate details about Marthas life and personality they
chose him to be a living archive (Lepecki 2010: 43).
In Lepeckis brilliant analysis, I see a way forward for the
preservation of dance. Not as an entry in a catalogue or an object on a
shelf, but as a living, breathing, evolving form, passed from one body,
one memory, one person to another. The Cunningham Trust has
recently announced the expansion of the Legacy Project to include a
Cunningham Fellowship for those who want to restage Cunningham
works of their choice (www.merce.org 2012). While these appear, for
now, to be straight reconstructions, one hopes that there will be space
in these re-stagings for a haunting to occur. For growth and new
possibilities, fluidity and change to be a part of Cunninghams work in
death, just as they were in life.

14

WORKS CITED
Brown, Carolyn. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Tears with
Cage and Cunningham. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2007.
Hamera, Judith. An Answerability of Memory: Saving Khmer
Classical Dance. TDR 46, No. 4. Winter 2002: 65-85.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today
29, No. 1. Spring 2008: 103-128.
Homans, Jennifer. Apollos Angels: A History of Ballet. New York:
Random House, 2010.
Lepecki, Andre. The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the
Afterlives of Dances. Dance Research Journal 42, No. 2. Winter
2010: 28-48.
www.merce.org, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 2010.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Thomas, Anne Elise. Practicing Tradition: History and Community
in an Appalachian Dance Style. Western Folklore 60, No. 2/3.
Spring/Summer 2001: 163-181.
Vaughn, David. Archives of the Dance (2): Building an Archive:
Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Dance Research: The
Journal for the Society for Dance Research 2, No. 1. Spring 1984:
61-67.
Whatley, Sarah. Archives of the Dance: Siobhan Davies Dance
Online. Dance Research 26, No. 2. Winter 2008.

15

You might also like