Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, MA
through August 25, 2019
by Karoun Charkoudian
 |
| Photo by Grace Kathryn Landefeld |
In celebration of the centennial of the birth of Merce
Cunningham (d. 2009), the dancer’s works will be performed around the world
this summer, and Compagnie CNDC-Angers achieved their Jacob’s Pillow debut.
Artistic director, Robert Swinton, was a student at the Pillow in 1971 and a
dancer with the Merc Cunningham Company at its final performance at the Pillow
in 2009.
The matinee opened with “Suite for Five.” Dancers clad in
muted pastel unitards were accompanied by a pianist who played the piano keys
and plucked the strings of the piano. The dancers held a similar rhythm to the
pianist; a slow deliberate dance. However, there was no synchronization between
the dancers themselves, nor was there synchronization between dancers and
pianist. This is the Merce Cunningham way, intending for the music and the
dance to be entirely independent, simply to share space and time together.
In “Inlets 2,” the live music was itself as much a part of
the spectacle as the dance. While the dancing occurred in random fashion on
stage, three musicians gently shook conch shells filled with water. The
water-drip-ocean sounds accompanied the dancers in no straight rhythm or beat.
The dance became almost dream-like, as the eight dancers moved on stage in
unison, and independently. But even in the way that the water sounds and the
performers offset each other, in the way that nothing matched, the water sounds
were so healing, and the lithe dancers’ bodies so hypnotizing, that the whole
experience became a desensitized, mellow, ethereal, dream.
In the third and final dance, “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and
Run” (which seemed like more of a nod to yoga and aerobics rather than to
soccer or football), was jarring and surprising. In Cunningham’s effort to show
that everyday sound is just as valid or even more appealing than organized
music, two people sat and told stories (slowly, quickly, at the same time, and
separately), as the dancers jumped, kicked, and wandered around the stage. The
result: both the spoken word and the dance competed for attention and the eyes
and the ears battled for which part of the performance to pay more attention
to.
The audience did not stand at the conclusion of this
performance. Walking out of the Ted Shawn Theatre that afternoon, those who
were well acquainted with Cunningham’s work seemed pleased, and those who were
not seemed in a daze, unsure of what to think of the performance.
