A TROUPE TURNS FIFTY.(Merce Cunningham Dance Company)(Brief Article)

COMMENT

DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS

CHIANTI POSTCARD

THE CREATIVE LIFE

BIG NIGHT

Sixty people rode the always unpredictable Westbeth elevators to Merce Cunningham's eleventh-floor dance studio on a warm day last month, for the inaugural event in what is shaping up as an eighteen-month celebration of the Cunningham company's fiftieth birthday. It was like an extended-family gathering, with old friends and new bathing in the deep currents of memory and emotion and absurdity that dance, the most ephemeral art, can offer in lieu of more tangible rewards. Several former Cunningham dancers were there, including Valda Setterfield, Meg Harper, and the incomparable Carolyn Brown, who danced with the original company in the summer of 1953, at Black Mountain College, and who has been helping Cunningham re-create some of his early dances for the company's upcoming season at Lincoln Center in late July. Re-creating "Suite for Five" (1956) was really hard, she said, "because there were no complete films of it here, and the ones that were taken in Europe were lost."

The guests filed into the main studio to watch Daniel Roberts, a current company member, perform a brief solo called "Totem Ancestor," which Cunningham had made for himself in 1942, at the outset of his career. Full of jagged, feral movements and astonishing jumps, it had been researched from handwritten notes by Roberts when he was a student at Ohio State, and still only dreaming of becoming a Cunningham dancer. Eight dancers then performed a twenty-minute section from "Ocean," the vast, evening-long 1994 work conceived by Cunningham and the composer John Cage, his artistic collaborator and lifelong friend, who died before it was completed. Cunningham is eighty-three. Frail, crippled by arthritis, he still tours the world with his company of sixteen young dancers, and he keeps right on making new dances, the latest of which, called "Loose Time," will have its New York premiere on the Lincoln Center program. After the excerpt from "Ocean," Cunningham sat at a table in the middle of the room and talked, briefly and with a sort of quiet merriment, about the old dances and the new one. Asked for his thoughts on the 1942 "Totem Ancestor," he simply said, "Well, it seemed longer then."