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 Cunningham’s 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. Cunningham’s 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 Cunningham’s 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, décor 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.
AUTHOR’S 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 Taylor’s 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
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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 Taylor’s 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 Cunningham’s 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 documents…There 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 Vaughn’s vision of the past. It is a true
archive, in Taylor’s 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 website—“a 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.
Vaughn’s 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
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British choreographer Siobhan Davies, discusses their desire to create overflowing records
that lend themselves to free interpretation. They want to include as 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.
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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 Taylor’s 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 Taylor’s 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, Apollo’s 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 bones…Thus 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 again…It is what Paul Connerton calls an ‘inscribing practice’” (Hamera
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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 dancer’s 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 revivify 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. Cunningham’s values. It is here that we physically experience
his interest in uneven rhythms and counter-intuitive coordinations. Without daily practice of
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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 Brown’s 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 open-ended 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 Taylor’s 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.
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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 the task. Why can’t it also be
taken up as a model for Western concert dance?
I want to end by discussing Andre Lepecki’s article, The Body as Archive: Will to ReEnact and the Afterlives of Dances, which presents a contrasting notion of what an archive can
be. He defies Taylor’s 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.
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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
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 Graham’s 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 Martha’s 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.
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Between 2000-2004 a legal battle halted the performance of all of Graham’s works
by her company and heirs. Move was the only person performing “her work” and became a
lieux de memoire where Graham’s complicated legacy could be experienced and stored.
“Move’s own system of transformation, composed by both dragging and re-enacting, was
creating, away from the institutional struggles over Graham’s corpse, a powerful corporeal
and affective archive – an archive that could unleash Martha’s voice as well as her body,
presence, dance eroticism, creativity and works” (Lepecki 2010: 42). In Lepecki’s article
Move talks of being “filled up” by Martha’s spirit, and Lepecki mentions that Martha’s
collaborators and friends began to tell Move intimate details about Martha’s life and
personality – they chose him to be a living archive (Lepecki 2010: 43).
In Lepecki’s 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 Cunningham’s work in death, just as
they were in life.
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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. Apollo’s 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.
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