DOUBLE OR NOTHING.(Merce Cunningham Dance Company)(Dance Review)

At the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's recent show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the average age of Cunningham's audience seemed to have dropped by about thirty years, and that is because the troupe, normally a rather egghead enterprise, chose to perform to rock music this season. Cunningham was one of the creators of America's mid-century modernism, as, more famously, was his lifelong collaborator, John Cage, who died eleven years ago. Accordingly, the Cunningham company, for most of its history, has performed to the sort of arrhythmic, ametric, amelodic "new music" that Cage and his cohort produced: somebody making electronic static, somebody shaking beans in a ...