Archives of the Dance (2) Building An Archive: Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Abstract

Anyone who has attempted to work in the field of dance scholarship knows how exasperatingly difficult it is to research the history even of contemporary dance companies, let alone those of the past. How often, for example, do we find programmes, posters, and flyers for dance performances which give only the day of the month, not the year, when they took place? Dancers themselves, notoriously, have short memories for such things; they may remember choreography in detail after many years, but when asked when a certain performance took place, have only the vaguest recollection. One often finds oneself in the position of knowing more about certain aspects of a dancer's career than the dancer himself. The reason is obvious: the very nature of dancing makes its practitioners concerned with the present and the future rather than the past, the opposite of the historian's preoccupation. Merce Cunningham has written eloquently of the dancer's experience of 'that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.' Like other choreographers of whose work I have some knowledge Frederick Ashton, for instance his concern is with the piece he is doing now, and the one he has in mind to do next. A dance completed represents a problem solved, or a process worked through to its conclusion. (Not that Cunningham does not, like other choreographers, make minor changes and adjustments to a finished dance. Just recently, he made a new version of his 1977 dance Inlets, recycling the original material for seven dancers instead of six.) My own association with Cunningham goes back to my earliest days in the United States. I went to New York at the invitation of Lincoln Kirstein in October 1950, with a scholarship to the School of American Ballet. At the time, Cunningham was teaching a modern dance class once a week there (with John Cage at the piano). In London, I had studied with Audrey de Vos, who taught a form of