Twos and Threes.(Think Punk!)(Nearly Ninety)(Dance review)

At the beginning of Merce Cunningham's "Nearly Ninety," which had its premiere on April 16th--his ninetieth birthday--at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, thirteen dancers came out in unitards (by Romeo Gigli) that had black sections laid over white. Some dancers had one white arm and one black; some had a swath of black over a white breastbone; others, charmingly, had a black buttock operating next to a white one. I think that this was a frank symbol of what Cunningham has always aimed for: a cross between abstraction and feeling, math and flesh.

Because our minds are so much more drawn to stories and pictures than to abstraction, Cunningham makes a special effort ...