Icono-Clan

By Thomas F. DeFrantz

When Merce Cunningham - who just turned 90 on April 16 - started showing his choreography in the 1950s, few American audiences were prepared for his austere vistas of bodies in motion without psycho-social motivation. An iconoclast willing to abandon what had come before, Cunningham insisted on abstraction and geometric accuracy; he welcomed the indeterminacy of working independently of theatrical designers and composers; he challenged audiences to derive story from their impressions of movements without narrative intention.  Originally trained at the Cornish School in Seattle, Cunningham became an international icon of contemporary choreography as the artist who broke open dance theater to let in alternative ways to stage memory, history, and desire.

We know that dance emerges from these spaces. What we remember - or what we want to remember - becomes the fertile ground where a dance and its performance grow. A fleeting gesture, a smell that awakens a sensation long forgotten, a melody half-heard - any of these can spark a creative exploration that becomes dance theater.
 
Or maybe dance starts from what we want to forget. Many contemporary dance mavericks have grown by rejecting the work of their teachers and mentors.  Martha Graham rejected the orientalist dances of Ruth St. Denis; Cunningham, who danced for Graham, grew weary of her caped goddesses and repressed Puritan women. Cunningham, who came of creative age in the socially prescribed America of the 1950s, masked his deepest desires in dances that stressed abstraction over personal interaction. Maybe he wanted to forget the bases of human folly that form the core of Graham’s oeuvre.  After all, Graham made dance theater that told of the human psyche.  Cunningham moved in a different direction, toward the things he liked about dancing: shape, line, mathematical possibilities.  
 
Gus Solomons, who continues to work as a dance critic and performer as well as choreographer, surely values histories of dance and the memories that feed its recounting. He also understands the caprice that often leads to choreography: he’s staged works that responded to the real-time sounds of the audience in a darkened theater, or the presence of books in an architecture library at his alma mater MIT, or tasks written on cards handed to performers as they enter the performance space.  As an artist, Solomons wonders what happens when things get changed unexpectedly, and memory opens itself to unprecedented future possibilities.
 
For years, Donald Byrd has tracked the landscapes of human desire as a personal, intellectual, and social capacity in his choreography.  His works explore how people *need* in their individual movements, through dance theater that asks questions of how groups of people need each other.. For Byrd, the desire to achieve excellence in performance - persistently defined by clarity and fullness of execution, aligned with an emotional transparency - becomes a call to imagine productive social interactions. Byrd proposes that we want to forget our ambitions, or what we’ve done, at times, when those memories seem less than flattering.  But what we want and what we need are not necessarily the same thing; Byrd’s choreography repeatedly engages this truth.
 
How are these three artists aligned? Obviously in the pervasive interest in movement abstraction; the ways in which physicality is often treated like architecture.  But they are also aligned personally:  Solomons danced for Cunningham; Byrd danced for Solomons; Solomons danced for Byrd; Byrd remembers, potently, how Cunningham danced. And on and on, as history, memory, and desire always seem to arrive in dance. Surely this unprecedented program answers Spectrum Artistic Director Byrd’s memory of Cunningham’s choreographic work in need of reconstruction. It answers his knowledge of the genealogies of artists whose histories overlap. And it answers an abiding desire to have us all savor connections in these works of three American iconoclasts.

Spectrum Dance Theater tickets are $15.00 – $29.50 (not including fees) and are available:
1. online at www.stgpresents.org,
2. by phone at (877)STG-4TIX
3. at The Paramount Theatre box office, Monday through Friday 10:00am-6:00pm
4. and at The Moore Theatre box office Tuesday through Friday 11:00am-2:30pm and 3:15pm-6:00pm or at venue kiosks.
The Moore Theatre is located at 1932 Second Avenue in downtown Seattle.