Nancy Dalva

Neil Greenberg on Merce Cunningham: "There's nothing else like it in the world"

 

Neil Greenberg with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company |photo Kristy Santimyer-Melita



Last September, Neil Greenberg came calling at Westbeth, at the 11th floor studio he called home from 1979-1986, the years he danced with The Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He watched some rehearsal of "Nearly Ninety," Merce's last work. He stepped out onto the floor and taught current company members a combination (see above). And he sat down for an interview for "Mondays with Merce." Film from that day is part of the latest episode of that series, all available free online at Mondays with Merce .

 Greenberg returned to New York City (he teaches now at the University of California at Riverside, where he's a Professor of Experimental Choreography) in late October, to dance in the Cunningham Memorial at the Park Avenue Armory--you can see film of that day in Neil's "Mondays with Merce," as well as film of Neil in his own wonderful choreography and in archival footage of the Charles Atlas/Merce Cunningham films "Channels/Inserts" and "Coast Zone."

Here's an excerpt from the transcript of Neil Greenberg's "Mondays with Merce" interview.

Neil Greenberg: I kept seeing Merce’s work after I left the company. Kind of had to. I mean for personal nurturance...There’s nothing else like it in the world.

Nancy Dalva:     And what does it give you?

Neil Greenberg: What does Merce’s work give me? It’s such a perceptually cleansing experience for me to sit in the audience and experience a Cunningham work...In any Cunningham work,  my perceptions feel so exercised, and it’s  that experience of walking out on the street afterwards and colors are brighter!  And all qualities, all experiential qualities are just more pronounced, more articulated. That’s the other thing that it does. It really articulates experience so that all of the component parts of any moment are all just so distinct   and heightened. You know,  it’s the thing that Cunningham told us as dancers: Make it as much as it can be without making it something else. So as an audience member out there, when I’ve seen a Cunningham work, life gets that way. Life-- without it being something else, without having to throw meaning onto the moment-- I can just experience the moment. A little more fully. A little .. well, just better. So that’s part of what I love about the work.

To see Neil in conversation, just click here: MwM 009: Dancing for Merce, with Neil Greenberg .

copyright Nancy Dalva 2009 (interview excerpt copyright Nancy Dalva and the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation)

Merce Cunningham, 1919-2009

The sky crackled with lightning last night, the air rattled with thunder, and at home, peacefully, in his sleep, Merce Cunningham joined with the elements so natural to him: the earth, the sky, the water, and the air.  Those birds he drew--they could fly, as he once could, and as, until his last week, he set his dancers to doing. He said recently that choreography had become, for him, "a habit of mind." We were talking, then (for "Mondays with Merce"), about how he could choreograph now that he could no longer move--as in like manner Beethoven composed when he could no longer hear.... As movement was taken from him, his dancers gave it back to him. So direct, their process with Merce: thought into movement, with nothing intermediary. These past months, he was tired; but he was game. He never stopped laughing, at himself as much as anyone or anything. To the end he was  gallant and courteous with visitors, and clear. Always clear, like those green eyes that could look as blue as the sky on a cloudless day.  I asked him this: "Merce, how is it that without music, without narrative, and with your using chance procedures to remove yourself, to keep from imposing your personality on the movement, that your dances are so passionate?" "Because," he said, "I love dancing!"
copyright 2009 Nancy Dalva
photo courtesy Hugo Glendinning

THIS WEEKEND IN NYC, JUNE 20-22

Dance by Neil Greenberg at DanceTheaterWorkshop

I recommend that all fans of Neil Greenberg--and anyone who doesn't know his work--see DANCE BY NEIL GREENBERG (www.neilgreenberg.org) at DanceTheaterWorkshop, on Friday and Saturday nights, at 7:30 pm. (www.dtw.org )

The evening includes Greenberg's excellent Quartet with Three Gay Men, first seen here in 2006, with Neil in the cast. This dance was made using videotape of Greenberg, edited by him, with the dancers acquiring his movement from the tape, and then his editing of this live material. The score is by RuPaul, and the wonderful composer-harpist Zeena Parkins. Here it is played on tape.

Parkins, joined by two other accomplished harpists, sits center stage--well, just off center to your right--in Greenberg's new work, Really Queer Dance with Harps. This dance can be seen as a culmination of 15 years of collaboration among the choreographer, the composer, and the lighting designer Michael Stiller. It can also be seen as a beginning of something new.

In other words, this is a transitional work. Here you see Greenberg doing the following things for the first time in his own work: using traditional partnering devices; having dancers touch; using material derived from others. None of these things is in itself very novel, but in Greenberg's diaristic canon, they are inaudible bombshells. The full length (50 minute) fantastically entertaining and lovely commissioned harp score is the first music to which Greenberg has listened before making his work, rather than working alongside or before the music. At least that is how I understand his process from a fine after-performance discussion lead by DTW Artistic Director Carla Peterson. Thanks to her, and to Executive Director Stephen Greco, for running this show over two weeks.

Greenberg is a dear figure to those who have followed his career. His work is personal, and one responds to its openness, its wit, its joy, and its released danciness with pleasure that is also personal. This opening out into new territory shows just how clearly Greenberg has previously drawn in his boundaries, set up his parameters, and claimed his own turf. What remains from his years dancing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1979-1986) (and I can still close my eyes and see him, way up in the air, feet  tracing needlepoint designs in space) is nothing of the outline, nothing of the content, and certainly nothing obvious from the technique or devices.

What remains is the wonderful connectedness of dancers who learn their work in silence, who rely on each other for cues, who must be attentive at all times to one another, as the question of who is cuing switches depending on who is in front,  who can be seen by whom, from where, and when. And just where is front? As in real life, front is whichever way one faces.

As Ezra Pound writes in his Pisan Cantos, "What thou lov'st well remains...."How good it is to have Neil Greenberg back in New York to wrap up the spring season at DTW. It's a better city with him in it.

Click on images  for larger view of the dances. Photos by Julieta Cervantes

Compagnie Maguy Marin at the Joyce Theater

Get out--or go buy--some earplugs, and catch Umwelt, Marguy Marin's (www.compagnie-maguy-marin.fr ) terrific show--for that's what it is-- at the Joyce Theater, Friday at 8 pm, Saturday at 2pm and 8pm, and Sunday at 2pm and 7:30pm. (www.joyce.org)  True, her partner Denis Mariotte's  soundscore (live electric music involving some rope played off a large fishing reel, across three prone electric guitars, and taken up by a pulling device, with the resulting sounds AMPLIFIED, to put it quietly, by a real-time computer process) is repellingly loud, causing after-ringing in some. But that--and the concomitant tumult from the perpetual wind tunnel, running from left to right (the rope is drawn from right to left--sound from every direction, sound and motion)--are mere environment for a dance that is about being an environment. A world onto itself. The program quotes Beckett, and otherwise explains at length what the choreographer would not explain during an extremely opaque q. and a. after Wednesday's performance. 

Symbols, what symbols? The woman with the dead pheasant in her mouth dragging it around as if she is a dog? The man with rabbit ears doing this and then that? The people in crowns? The baby dolls? The changing clothes? The constant appearance and reappearance of the nine people in the cast in varying combinations, in varying garments, or partial garments, or no garments?

 

The mirrored panels, staggered across the stage in two rows, with another wider screen of them at the back---what do they mean? Well, for one thing, they mean that the dance is entirely episodic, like a film cut into bits, and reassembled seemingly at random. Either life transpires as continuous scenes cut up, or life proceeds in fits and starts of occurrence and recurrence--but always with amplification, with something new.

New as this piece progresses are the constantly accumulating costumes--so many overcoats!--so many hats! wigs!--many discarded, some blowing off. The performers are the same. They stand in between the panels at the beginning of the work, which is about an hour long, and they stand there at the end. In between, they have separate moments, when the lights change, and the environment seems quieter, and each, in his or her own turn, stands and gazes at us. These solos, for that is what they are, are a recognition. We see them, they seem to see us.

Who is more implacable? The performer,paused for a moment in the frenzied accumulation of the piece; or the viewer, hands cupped over ears, daring the work to do something, to say something, to change something, to want something, to give something, to take something, to be something.

It can't go on. It does go on.

Click on images for larger views of the piece.  Photos by Ganet.

 

TRISHA'S BACK

If you go out in the woods today
You're sure of a big surprise.
The Teddy Bear’s Picnic

The Trisha Brown Dance Company shimmered into the Joyce Theatre in New York (from February 5-10) with a revival of “Foray Foret,” first performed in 1990 at the Dance Biennale in Lyon, France. Hence the bi-lingual title, though the forest suggested is clearly here. This is established by the work’s novel score: an indistinct, offstage American marching band, heard intermittently. They are playing John Philip Sousa. The hoopla  of the everyday world goes on, at a distance, muffled yet cheerful.

Most of the piece transpires in silence, or silences–as if quietude could lap at you like waves. The dancers, too, are slippery. There are novel partnering strategies, and novel forms of coalescence, as if the dancers were released from a single blob of mercury, and inclined to recombine. There is a silvery calligraphy of small gestures, and the signature Brownian loft of leg, of arm, and the sweep of larger gestures that have no conclusion, but simply waft off into the choreographic aether.

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