It was hard to tell what Merce was thinking while Cage was talking. He looked like he might have been vaguely irritated. But I could have been projecting.
Cage died eleven years after that interview, but Merce lasted another twenty-eight.
Speaking of very old people: when I went out to pick up some groceries early that evening, I saw the maintenance man coming out of Bugs Bunny’s sister’s apartment. He had on a tool belt and he was standing there in the hallway as she screamed at him from just inside her apartment.
“SO IT’S WOYKIN’ NOW?”
“Ees okay, ees juss a leel… you juss gonna pay tainshun wenna you flushing. You juss gonna hola downa da hendel…”
“WHAT? YA GOTTA SPEAK LOUDAH, MY EAHS AH SHOT!”
The maintenance guy looked at me, it seemed, imploringly. I stuck my head in her doorway and shouted, “HOLD THE HANDLE DOWN WHEN YOU FLUSH!”
She nodded: “OKAY GOT IT.” She smacked her gums, and then smiled and gave us both a thumbs-up.
As we walked toward the elevator, she stuck her head out the door and shouted, “WAS DAT YA GOYLFWEN’? DAT CHINESE GOYL? I SAW A CHINESE GOYL GOIN’ IN YA APAHTMENT.”
I said, “JUST A FRIEND.”
She said, “CUTE. VEWY CUTE.”
We smiled at each other and she gave me another thumbs-up.
It was true, Fang was cute. But weird. I guess Bugs Bunny’s sister didn’t notice that part. Fang made a lot of her own clothes, or modified things she picked up at the Salvation Army. She did that free-form style of crochet that resembles seaweed, or fungus. I think they call it “scrumbling.” She would attach pieces of this to the necklines of her shirts, and the tops of her boots. Sometimes she used fibrous organic materials like shredded banana peels or leaves that would start to smell a little funny after a while.
She had a bracelet she’d made out of hardened goose shit that she found near Prospect Park.
She also had a pierced septum. Every time I looked at it I thought of that Edward Lear poem, “The Owl and the Pussycat,” in which the unlikely newlyweds have to travel very far in a boat in order to find a ring, and they get it from a pig who’s wearing it in his nose.
So I guess Bugs Bunny’s sister just saw Fang from a distance, because I think if she’d gotten a good look at the septum ring or the scrumbling, she might have found it a little off-putting. If you didn’t get too close, Fang looked pretty normal.
I texted Fang that night to invite her out for a beer, in order to thank her for taking care of the plants. As I said, I was pretty low on cash money, but I was expecting a direct deposit of my fellowship payment in two days and thought I’d probably make it until then, even treating Fang. I texted Dan Ferguson, too. He suggested we meet at Marie’s Crisis, which is a supergay piano bar in the West Village where the patrons all sing show tunes. Fang and I didn’t know most of the words to the songs (except for the really obvious ones like “My Favorite Things”), and even Dan isn’t really a belter, but it was fun. I started to tell them the story about Merce and what he said when Cage died, but I gave up halfway through because it was really loud and they couldn’t hear me. Still, it cheered me up a little, going out.
Over the next few days, I watched a lot of Merce. There were some more interviews, and films of him giving class in his studio. These reminded me of the few classes I’d had with him years ago. He was very understated. The phrase he used most often was, “Okay, go.”
I watched him in some old archival footage dancing in Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring. I watched the Charles Atlas films, and Beach Birds for Camera. But the film that I found most beautiful was an excerpt from Septet, which he composed in 1957, although the film was of a performance in 1964. The excerpt is of the section danced to the En Plus movement. Even though he was already collaborating with Cage, Septet was set to Satie – Trois morceaux en forme de poire. I’m not sure why Satie called it three pieces, since there are seven parts, and it’s difficult to say what’s pear-shaped about them. They were piano pieces to be played by four hands.
En Plus is the most beautiful. Merce dances this section with three women. One of them is Carolyn Brown (exquisite). I’m not sure who the other two were. The choreography is very slow and controlled. Merce tends to occupy the center, and at times the three women appear to be allegorical figures (muses?) framing him. They lean into each other, or away, finding a kind of off kilter balance. The orientation keeps shifting, and you’re often aware of geometry, torque, and perspective, and yet there are moments when they’ll assume a pose and you’re tempted to read some kind of emotionalism into it. At one point all three women are arranged slightly askew of Merce, but they kind of tilt their heads and look at him. He’s on one knee with his left leg extended before him, and he seems to bow his head down to Carolyn Brown, maybe sadly, maybe respectfully.
Just a couple of years ago Carolyn Brown published a memoir of her years with Merce. She said it wasn’t always easy. She loved him but he could be a little chilly. But at the end, when it was time for her to stop dancing, she said he treated her with “exceptional kindness.” After her last performance, after she took her bows, she went to his dressing room. She wanted to thank him. He said, “It’s been a wonderful twenty years. You’re beautiful and I’ve never told you enough.”
People often know when they don’t say enough.
Sven of course was concerned about how I was taking Merce’s death. I sent him the links to a couple of the YouTube videos – Septet, and that interview with Cage. When I suggested Cage might be stoned, he responded “:),” which was funny because that’s exactly what Cage looked like when he giggled.
I asked him how things were going with his meds and he said a little better. En lite bättre.
I ran into Bugs Bunny’s sister that week in the hallway. She had just come back from Morton Williams and she was having a difficult time negotiating the key to her place, the walker, and her groceries, so I offered to help her. She seemed genuinely appreciative. She said, “YAW A NICE YOUNG MAN. I WASN’T SO SHUAH WHEN I FOYST SAW YA, BUT YAW A NICE POYSON.” She winked at me when she said this, as though she were joking about her early suspicions, but it was probably true. As I said before, I couldn’t blame her.
I asked her if she needed any help putting things away. She said, “NAH, BUT COME ON IN FAW A SECON’. I WANNA SHOW YA SUMP’N.”
Her apartment had a lot of stuff in it. I guess that’s not surprising since she’d been living there for about 50 years. There were lots of tchotchkes, and quite a few shopping bags of stuff on top of the chairs and tables. I was wondering where it was she sat down.
She said, “WAIT A MINUTE, I WANNA SHOW YA SUMP’N. I FOUN’ IT TODAY, I CYAN’ BELIEVE I STILL GOT IT.”
She wheeled her walker into the kitchen, rummaged around for a while, and came back with something small gripped between her fingers as she simultaneously clung to the handle bars of the walker. She slowly made her way toward me and then held it out for me to examine: a matchbook with a garish, colorful illustration. She didn’t have to tell me what it was, but she did.
“IT’S SIEGFWIED AND WOY! I SAW ’EM AT THE STAHDUST IN 1978. DAT WAS A GWEAT SHOW. DEY WAS TWO GOOD-LOOKIN’ GUYS, I’M TELLIN’ YA! LOOK!”
I said, “WOW, THAT’S GREAT.” I hesitated, but then I asked, knowing how much Sven would love this. “CAN I TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS WITH MY CELL PHONE?”
She looked perplexed, and said, “WHAT?”
I repeated the question, showing her my phone. Evidently the problem wasn’t that she thought it was a weird thing to want to photograph. She just wasn’t that familiar with this particular use of a phone. But when she got what I was suggesting, she said, “OH SHUAH, TAKE A PICSHA!”
I did.
Later that day I texted Sven, and attached the photo. I thought about making a joke about them looking kind of like us, but then I didn’t. Sven seemed more interested in the tiger between them. He said, “nice tiger.”
I was trying to dr
aft a letter to the academic presses to which I planned to submit my manuscript. Wesleyan seemed like an obvious choice. I also wanted to approach Routledge (despite the little faux-pas I’d made about my book’s “market” at PSi), and possibly Illinois, which seemed to be expanding its dance publications, despite the general contractions of university presses. For the narrative overview of the project, I began by cutting and pasting from my dissertation’s abstract, but I was pretty sure the editors’ interest would begin to flag around the third sentence, when I began dog-paddling into the murky waters of “grammatological impossibility.” I pulled up the Microsoft Word Reference Tools to see if I could find a better phrase. The thesaurus didn’t contain “grammatological” but suggested I might mean “grain elevator, grain sorghum, grain weevil, grained, or grains of paradise.” The best replacement for “impossibility” seemed to be “ridiculousness.” I wondered if I should be trying to make this book sound more like a comedy.
Just a couple of weeks before Merce’s death, there’d been a story in the Times about the “legacy plan” he was developing with his company. He knew he wasn’t going to be around forever, and wanted to make a plan for preserving his work. Actually, preserving isn’t the word – he was determined not to mummify it, but to allow it to move gracefully into the world and assume different configurations in its afterlife. At the same time, he wanted to make sure his company members would be able to transition into the next stage of their careers, without him. He wanted for the company to continue touring with the repertory for a period of two years, and then to disband. He wanted to set aside funds for the company members to have a year’s salary as severance pay, along with “extra money to help find new careers.” Staff members and musicians would also be looked after. Merce’s Trust would oversee licensing of his choreographies, and his former dancers and archivists would establish “dance capsules” – digital pods containing video documentation, lighting plans, décor and costume designs, production notes and so on. These could be accessed by researchers, or by dancers interested in recreating the pieces. But Merce knew that any future forms the dances would take would be, of necessity, different.
He told the reporter for the Times : “It’s really a concern about how do you preserve the elements of an art which is really evanescent, which is really like water… It can disappear. This is a way of keeping it – at least with our experience here – of keeping it alive.”
I’d read this article when it came out, which was just shortly after Pina’s death. So I’d read it thinking of Pina. Now I went online to read it again. When I was searching for it, I found another version of the same story published at about the same time in The Wall Street Journal. It was by Terry Teachout. It was titled: “Why Dances Disappear: Can Merce Cunningham Save His Work by Killing His Company?” Obviously, the headline was supposed to grab your attention – Merce didn’t really want to “kill” his dancers – and in fact Teachout’s depiction of Merce was very affecting: “instead of trying to keep his company alive in order to preserve his dances ‘as is,’ he’s going to send them out into the world and let them make their own way. That sounds very much like the decision of a wise parent, one who loves his children, trusts them to do the right thing – and knows that, sooner or later, they’ll have to fend for themselves.”
It’s interesting, though – I had to read that paragraph several times to figure out whether Teachout was talking about his wishes for his dancers or for his dances. Actually, I’m still not sure.
The tongue-in-cheek sensationalism of the title of that article, implying that Merce had murderous tendencies, did manage to set off my mild but increasing paranoia – not that I was actually suspecting Merce of any wrongdoing. On the contrary, I felt it was his demise that was looking a little suspicious. I mean, rationally, I knew he was very, very old, and he’d been working out these “legacy” plans precisely because everyone knew he didn’t have much time. But it was so weird that his death occurred so quickly after MJ’s, and then Pina’s. I’m sure you’re shaking your head as you read this. There was a logical explanation for everything. But it didn’t help matters that all too soon I discovered that dubious ballet carper lurking around the scene of the crime.
In the midst of my week of YouTube Merce immersion, I paused to check in on the rebel moth. It was partly the discovery of Merce’s Satie choreography, which made me think of hers – but also, I was just missing her. To my delight, she’d posted a new dance! It was set to Satie’s final Gnossienne, Avec conviction et avec une tristesse rigoureuse. The description said, merely: “It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness – ” It was clear to me that she was memorializing Cunningham. And Cage.
It was her first partnered dance. That is, partnering is a funny term to use to describe this piece.
Partner is actually a word that irks me. I mean in virtually all the contexts in which it’s used. Sven rolls his eyes when I say this. But this is what I mean: obviously there’s an overdetermined history to the idea of partnering in Western dance – especially ballet. I already told you about that essay by Susan Foster, about the “ballerina’s phallic pointe.” You get the idea: the male dancer holds the ballerina in front of him and she sticks out her long pink leg with its stiff pink prosthetic extension protruding off the end of her foot. He wags her around at the audience as if to say, “Look at this long pink stiff thing I am wielding around before you.”
Of course there’s plenty of classical, romantic choreography that I enjoyed dancing, and I can see the beauty, but let’s face it, there are problems with this.
Modern dance changed a lot of that, and maybe Merce was the most interesting one to play with classical ideas about partnering, but it’s almost because he maintained some of the premises of ballet that he made it interesting. There were other people, contact improvisers, wacky postmodernists, intercultur-alists, who did some pretty radical things. But Merce changed the relation even though he often worked with male/female pairings. In Septet, right after that moment when he bows his head down to Carolyn Brown, he rises, moves behind her, and holds her as she slowly dips down in a deep attitude devant in grand plié. He seems to be supporting her tenderly. But what holds them together is difficult to pin down.
In her memoir, she wrote that he once dropped her on her hip very painfully, and she had the distinct impression that he’d done it on purpose.
What really goes on between two people is very difficult to say.
Gay marriage is legal in Sweden. It has been since May of 2009. So naturally Sven and I had talked about it. Given my professional situation, it wasn’t really something that would have been beneficial to us. I’d never been a fan of marriage. My parents split up when I was very young and my mother never indicated any inclination to try it again. I couldn’t blame her. When gay marriage became a political issue, of course I was torn: if there were legal benefits to be gained, they should be equally accessible to everyone, but I had no understanding of why the state should be interested in whether people were involved in committed sexual or romantic relationships. Aside from the RSB, democratic socialism had been part of the attraction of living in Sweden – this kind of thing really shouldn’t even be necessary.
Sven thought I was over-intellectualizing the question because I couldn’t deal with my emotions. He’s a romantic.
Partner struck me as an ugly euphemism. Euphemism only in the sense that people don’t like to talk about sex, so they displace it into some kind of business model. Since I have a distaste for business, I see no appeal to something that sounds like a financial leadership team.
Husband in Swedish is man, or make. Partner in Swedish is partner . Or kompanjon. I guess that’s another euphemism we use in English. It’s a little less distasteful to me.
Boyfriend in Swedish is pojkvan, which is a combination of pojk (boy) and van (skilled). I think that’s kind of hot.
When I was looking up the sign language for “The Man I Love,” I learned that the sign for man is a com
bination of boy (skimming the brim of your imaginary cap) and fine (indicating the ruffles on your imaginary nice shirt).
In that interview at the Walker Art Center, the one with the young woman who gives you the impression she’s wearing braces, John Cage described the relationship between the music and the dance in his collaborations with Merce. He said they didn’t want one to take precedence over the other. They wanted it to be about “being together in the same place and the same time.” That is, the music and the dance being together in the same place and the same time. But it seems like that was maybe also their domestic ideal. I don’t know if anybody can really say whether they managed to do it or not.
I have gotten way off topic.
The rebel moth had posted a partnered dance. There was no man. The moth was dancing with a mannish woman. It took me a minute to figure this out. She was what we sometimes call a “handsome woman” – very striking, with chiseled features and small, bookish glasses. Her arms were bare, and muscular. She was seated in a chair.
The seated figure didn’t really look like a dancer – she looked sort of like she might have been the super of the building, or a neighbor who had stopped by for a chat – but her movement was highly stylized and, while not exactly technical, tasteful and restrained.
The moth had on ballet slippers and some kind of long, dark lacy tutu. Her own movement was vaguely balletic, but her arm gestures recalled something much more functional: semaphore.
You’ll recall the original title of my dissertation. I’m interested in this kind of thing.
But semaphore didn’t seem to be the only form of communication in the video. That seated figure had a tattoo on her inner bicep – you could see it when she extended her arm. It was a word – I was sure of it – but there was no way to make it out in the dim, low-res video, even when I paused it on full screen.
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