The Black Dancing Body

One of the good things about being trapped in the house through snows and floods is getting to catch up on various documentaries you have missed.  About once every two months I click through all the documentaries that will be shown on Direct TV and tape the ones I am interested in.  They usually sit for several months until I finally get around to them.

The first doc I watched was Carmen & Geoffrey.  Directed by Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob, the 2009 release follows this dynamic partnership.

Geoffery Holder was a theater and dance fixture beginning in the early 1950's.  His stunning art work has often been compared to that of Paul Gauguin.  In 1955, Carmen de Lavallade appeared with Holder in "House of Flowers"  and they married shortly after and spent 59 years working and creating until Holder's death in 2014.

The documentary is a bit heavy on the Holder side, and the dance sequences featuring de Lavallade could have been much longer.  Still, a wonderful look at two giants of dance.

After watching it, I pulled Brenda Dixon Gottschild's The Black Dancing Body off the shelf.  The book looks at race, racism, body image, body language, and stereotypes in dance and how they echo and comment on racism in society as a whole.

When I got to A Ballerina's Tale, the story of Misty Copeland, I was glad to see that one of the interviews was with Gottschild, whose book was published long before Copeland's rise.  The contrast of time is very interesting.

Copeland is like a rock star, mobbed every time she walks out the stage door. She is, for many young girls, the corporeal realization of what can be. Even as a dancer, Copeland speaks eloquently about seeing black dancers on film and weeping as they were dancers she never knew existed.

One hopes that with the Netfixification of culture, films like A Ballerina's Tale as well as Carmen & Geoffery will have a much wider audience and all little girls and boys can envision themselves dancing... or what ever they want to do.

Merce Cunningham 1919 - 2009

“What interests me is movement.
Not movement that necessarily refers to
something else, but is just what it is.Like
when you see somebody or an animal move,
you don’t have to know what it’s doing.”

Merce Cunningham

Merce (detail) by Herb Ritts

Merce Cunningham died in his sleep last night. He danced every performance with his company until he was 70 years old. Mercier Philip Cunningham did not follow the family tradition and practice law. As fate would have it, a neighbor had been a vaudeville performer and he took classes from her. Later, studying at Seattle's Cornish School, he met Martha Graham and joined her company where he remained for six years before striking out on his own.

In 1953, Cunningham founded his own company while teaching at Black Mountain College, an influential educational haven where the study of art was paramount. Cunningham taught with the likes of Walter Gropius, Robert Creely, Franz Klein, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Siskind, Charles Olson, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Lou Harrison, Buckminster Fuller, and John Cage.

John Cage and Merce Cunningham

Cunningham and Cage met at Seattle's Cornish School in 1942. Their association lasted fifty years, until Cage's death in 1992. During that time, both collectively and individually, they left an indelible impact on art in the Twentieth Century. After Cage's death Cunningham remarked, " “On the one hand, I come home at the end of the day and John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home and John’s not there.”

In 2005, Cunningham showed a little known talent, drawing. Aperture, published Other Animals, collecting many of the dancer's quirky and delightful images.

Tiger 5/3/97 -- Drawing by Merce Cunningham

Listen to a fragment from Sixty-Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham for unaccompanied voice with mic, by John Cage.

Eliot Caplan did a lovely documentary on the collaboration of Cage and Cunningham, which is widely available, entitled: Cage Cunningham - A Film by Elliot Caplan.

Read the extensive New York Times obituary.