Capturing a moment | 11 April 2019

On Tuesday, thousands of miles apart, in three great cities, London, New York and Los Angeles, 75 dancers will dance 100 solos in each venue in honour of the late iconoclastic choreographer Merce Cunningham, who would have turned 100 that day. It is a spectacularly ambitious wake for the choreographer who for 70 years denied dance a dramatic or expressive face, and threw all norms of beginnings, middles and ends, of meaningful sequence or physical logic, into a bonfire of expectations.

This fabulous celebration, involving dancers of the whole spectrum from contemporary to the Royal Ballet, is a declaration of intent for posterity by the Cunningham Trust, established since his 2009 death to ensure digital preservation of 86 of his dances for future performance and study. Cunningham the iconoclast has been iconographed.

Dance is lousy at preserving itself, and Cunningham is unquestionably one of the 20th century’s half dozen defining choreo-graphers, so careful posterity planning is theoretically a Good Thing. Yet there is a real sense of the bizarre in formulating means to repeat and reproduce perplexing, often magical danceworks that were, by planning, virtually unrepeatable, intended for impermanence and unplannedness.

He famously described dance as ‘that single fleeting moment when you feel alive’, hailing its vital ephemerality by contrast with the dead manuscripts, scores and pictures of the other arts. No other choreographer asked such good questions about dance, and posed them so dazzlingly: what is a start? Why is there a front? Where does it go in the space? When is next? Thickets of questions, enveloped in alluring artworks by America’s greatest modernists and provoking sounds by its musical adventurers and experimentalists.

To watch a Merce Cunningham dance, it was mandatory that your ears, eyes, brain, imagination all had to switch on together at the moment the curtain went up, with no prior help.