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    Restaging Suite for Five: The Quiet at the Center

    In the fall, this dance, choreographed by Merce Cunningham, will be one piece of a larger whole: the exhibition Leap Before You Look, opening at the Wexner Center in September. Leap Before You Look features the writers, composers, artists, and one notable choreographer, Cunningham, who were colleagues at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1933-1957). The avant-garde work of this group has been profoundly influential on contemporary art for most of the twentieth-century, and Merce Cunningham became a legend, a titan in the world of modern dance. Several of his dances from the Black Mountain period will be performed in a Wexner Center gallery; they will be the dance component of this larger, multi-disciplinary endeavor. For now, though, on a Friday in June, the scale is intimate; this dance is itself in pieces, and two women are carefully putting it together in a studio across the plaza from the Wex.

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    They are side by side, and if their movement were sped up twenty times, they would be running. Instead, their grand strides are methodic and controlled. The foot that gets left behind is pointed and stretched, and the arms make precisely etched shapes. One of the women is intoning instructions: “Just stay in this medium range…then da! Da da! da! Da da!” Everything changes, and they are propelled around a curving path.

    Karen Eliot, Professor of Dance at OSU and former member of Merce Cunningham’s dance company, is coaching Angelica Bell, dancer and MFA student in the OSU Department of Dance. They are stopping and starting, painstakingly bringing one of Cunningham’s dances, Suite for Five (1956), to life. They had a full cast of five dancers for rehearsals in April and Eliot’s colleague, Daniel Roberts, was there too. The whole group will be back in rehearsals in August, but for now, it’s just Eliot and Bell.

    In the world of concert dance where the use of a notated dance score is rare, the restaging of such a historic dance is done through the dance equivalent of oral tradition—dancers teach the work to other dancers. Eliot performed a section of Suite for Five when she was in Cunningham’s company (1982-87). Because she was new to the work, the movement felt so complicated that she wrote down what happened in rehearsal, taking notes just so she could keep the sequence straight in her head. Today in rehearsal, she frequently consults her notebook.

    That notebook isn’t the only piece in Eliot’s personal jigsaw process of reviving Suite; there is a second notebook as well, this one full of her notes from repeated viewings of videos of other Cunningham company restagings of Suite for Five—in 2005, 2007, and 2011. Eliot herself danced only one role, and from only one section of Suite, so she relies on those videos to fill in her understanding of what all five dancers are doing throughout the piece. She also relies on Roberts, who danced with Cunningham’s company (2000-05) and is collaborating with Eliot on the restaging of this and several other dances for Leap Before You Look. Roberts had performed Suite for Five in its entirety, so he also has strong memories of the piece.

    Among these several versions of Suite for Five—the ones in Eliot’s and Roberts’s memories and the ones in all those videos—there are disparities. Eliot’s notes say lunge on count 16 and close on count 17, but Roberts’s memory is that there is no lunge, just close. So they pick their way through, making decisions along the way about what will be the version they use for the performances in October. This is one of the reasons they stick with this low-tech methodology of having Eliot teach it to Bell directly, step by step, rather than having Bell watch a video and learn the part on her own time, based on what she sees on the screen. This is typical in other dance restagings, but won’t do here. Not only is a video just one among the various versions, but it also preserves the personal idiosyncracies of individual performers. Eliot can discern what movements are important to Cunningham’s choreography and what movements are just quirks of that particular dancer, captured on video. Finally, Eliot avoids sending dancers away to learn from video because she wants to recreate the way the dances were taught to her and the other dancers in Cunningham’s company: physically, with vocal reinforcement.

    Eliot continues to dance alongside Bell, narrating “She’s skittering behind you. She actually takes her cue from you,” and, “As you go, you’re kind of keeping your focus on him.” The studio is populated with phantom dancers: the other four who will comprise the cast of Suite for Five. At one point, Eliot steps in front of Bell and becomes one of those dancers, stretching her arms wide and holding Bell’s hands as they tilt together.

    The challenges of building a dance for five people when only one of them is present are greater than you might think. Suite for Five is not choreographed to music; rather, the dancers maintain a shared timing, moving independently but arriving at key moments together. Cunningham himself used a stopwatch and, according to Eliot, knew how long each phrase for each dancer should take. Today, though, Eliot is speaking about maintaining an internal rhythm—knowing if it’s “da! da! da!” instead of “daa…daa…daa.” Although Bell is replicating that rhythm with her body, both women admit that when all the dancers are there, her timing will probably need to be tweaked so that she fits in with the group’s timing. Furthermore, the dancers cue each other; one dancer’s particular movement lets another dancer know that it’s time to begin the next phrase. The rehearsal director must see how all the cogs in this machine fit together, and the dancers must understand how their particular cogs fit with the cogs around them.

    Although the dance was not created to match music, there will be music accompanying it; part of Cunningham’s radical creative process was allowing music and dance to occupy the same space but not making either one serve the other. For Suite, there is a score by Cunningham’s frequent collaborator and Black Mountain College colleague, John Cage, that will be played live on a “prepared” piano (one that has objects placed on or between the strings to alter the sound) by musician Susan Chess. The length of Cage’s music and Cunningham’s dance do correlate, but Eliot explains that the dancers don’t have to pay attention to Chess: “Susan’s just doing her thing. She starts when the dance starts; she ends when the piece ends. The dancers start with the music, and they end when the piece ends.”

    Bell goes through the entire dance alone to cement the sequence in her mind and body, sometimes cuing herself aloud, sometimes pausing until she can remember what comes next. Occasionally, when she’s really stumped, she asks Eliot, who is reviewing her notebooks, for a prompt. They commiserate over the “devilish” part and, when she’s done with her run-through, Bell takes notes of her own.

    Another famously ground-breaking aspect of Cunningham’s choreographic process was the use of chance procedures. Not only are phrases of dance unrelated to musical phrases, they don’t follow a narrative or thematic thread either. In their survey of dance in the twentieth century, No Fixed Points, Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick explain Cunningham’s methods for Suite for Five. Dancers knew their own phrases; then Cunningham assigned them numbers to determine where in space their movement would occur, and superimposed several sheets of paper so that some blemishes coincide, thus establishing when people dance together. This somewhat randomized process of assembling a dance might be part of the reason why it is difficult to learn; it doesn’t follow the musical or movement logics that most dancers are accustomed to. Bell ruefully comments that Suite is “really brainy.”

    The severing of music and dance’s traditional interdependence, the use of chance procedures to create the dance—through these practices, Cunningham not only rescinded some creative control, he also established himself among the artistic avant-garde that included Cage as well as artist Robert Rauschenberg and later, after the Black Mountain years, Andy Warhol. Cunningham’s experimental methods are all part of the creative process in the studio, though. What of his radical thinking is visible in the product on stage? That is, when Columbus audiences see Suite for Five in October, how might it appear radical to them?

    Eliot’s first answer is that it’s always the music. Cage’s score not only has nothing to do with the dance, it is not easy or pleasant to listen to. This challenging aural experience shades the viewer’s perception of the dance. Furthermore, the dance can have a classical feel to it, full of clear shapes and lines, but then some of those shapes turn out to be quirky or odd, further unsettling the viewer. Finally, Eliot notes that the necessary visual cues among dancers require them to be very focused on each other rather than projecting focus out to the audience. The result is an internal, self-sufficient world, one that would seemingly go on regardless of whether or not there is an audience present, and this can feel baffling to watchers.

    Bell stands in profile, her face to the ceiling. Her arms are alternating, folding at the elbows: one-two-three-four-five-siiiiiiix. She is performing this section for Eliot, and when she’s done, Eliot is enthusiastic: “Yes! That’s great!” They decide to move on to a different section of Suite for Five, one in which Bell has already learned two different dancers’ parts and will learn yet a third today.

    The sheer number of slippery moving parts in this scenario—the dancers’ trajectories that are independent but interlocking, the music that co-exists but does not intrude, the versions in Eliot’s memory and Roberts’s memory and on videotapes—seems overwhelming. Why complicate this already intricate machine by trying to put it together now, when most of the dancers are absent? What good is this work they’re doing today, just the two of them?

    For Eliot, it is advantageous that Bell is in town now and wanted to keep working; these rehearsals allow her to move some of the information she is carrying in her head and in her notes out into a dancing body, to see how it looks. Furthermore, Bell will now be able to help Eliot teach the material to the other dancers in August. For Bell, the advantages of these one-on-one rehearsals are multiple. Most pragmatically, she laughs, if she were away from this dance all summer, it would be really hard to come back to in the fall. Beyond that, she finds that she is excited to be part of a historical reconstruction: to see Eliot’s notes and some of Cunningham’s own notes, and to negotiate among the many parallel versions of Suite. She is most excited, though, by the dancing itself. Largely unfamiliar with Cunningham’s technique and choreography before coming to OSU, she has fallen in love with the movement and the ideas behind it. Although she refers to the dancing as both fragile and terrifying, saying “You have to be so present, physically and mentally, or it will just collapse,” she also find that dancing this way feels right for her. It’s like no experience she’s ever had, and it’s one that she wants to pursue as far as she can.

    So today’s efforts in a quiet studio are an important part in the complicated whole. Eliot and Bell’s work here will snowball, accruing more dancers, music, and a specially built platform stage in a Wexner gallery. Eventually, it will be an integral piece in this massive retrospective of the work of maverick artists from many disciplines. Today, though, this rehearsal is like the “quiet center” to which the original program notes for Suite for Five refer; it is the source from which the events of the dance revolve.

    For more information, visit mercecunningham.org and Wexarts.org closer to the date.

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    Veronica Dittman Stanich
    Veronica Dittman Stanich
    Veronica Dittman Stanich writes about dance and other important matters. From 1993-2004, she danced for a variety of choreographers in New York and co-produced The Industrial Valley Celebrity Hour in Brooklyn.
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