BEACH BIRDS-REMEMBERING MERCE C.

If...If his works had not been mediated by the masterful ballet technique, Merce's strange "birds" would have been proven to be another unbearable pop melodrama of extreme banality.

It seems that gay art has an inherent tendency for the over-emotional and Merce C. decided not to give in. Nor to give up his efforts to invent a more sophisticated, detached movement vocabulary. He could be said to be among the first, responsible for the theorization of modern -and post-modern- dance, which led many mediocre works to stardom, thanks to the fervent analysts of "genres" and styles, products of an interdisciplinary approach, born in the Universities.
His elaborate thinking and methodical approach to choreography, the union of dance to questions earlier asked by artists such as Duchamp, i.e. in regard to the relation of a work of art to its maker, as well as to the origins of its possible value and price in the market.

Merce Cunningham lied: the levitating legs of his dancers, their constant "hiccupey" break of action as if reluctant which way to go as if they changed their minds constantly unable to focus on a single action, clearly added to him giving to the world some of the ugliest moments in art. And this comes from someone who can take "ugly in art" either as hard-core scenes or disturbing ones. He could have been named the "no-action hero" of dance...

Having given voice to the then new American dance, he earned prominence, more than his work could have ever afforded him to. However, strangely enough, it seems that his work will live longer than that of his pupils of the post-modern strand. Though his choreographies look equally dated, the affiliation with ballet, despite its resemblance to a desperate effort at deconstructing Balanchine, was a smart move.

The question however, persists: did his dancers, his brilliant dancers made a career at...nothing and for nothing?

Before closing, it should be mentioned, even in passim, that despite his experiments with space, music, positioning, fixed theatrical spots and movement, he remains a modern for his closeness to fundamental issues for mankind, although he deviated a little with his focusing on questions of identity of both the artist and the work of art; he also remains an "American artist". If Martha Graham took on an American identity as a necessary, multi-coloured, extremely weighed upon ideological cape, Merce Cunningham bears the specific signs of a particular society at a given time; his, is a settled and permanent identity, and his work is that of a particular community. That makes him both contemporary, in the narrow and most difficult sense, and with a foot in the post-modern movement.