'Cunningham' documentary features dance legend's beautiful steps, but not much information on how he decided to place them
Merce Cunningham — the choreographer, dancer and icon of modern dance, whose career is chronicled in the documentary “Cunningham” — resisted when interviewers asked him to describe his style. “I don’t describe it, I just do it,” he would say.
That may be a good way for a choreographer to cut through the labels and traditions of dance, but it leaves a documentarian — in this case, Alla Kovgan, who also wrote and edited the film — in a bind. If Cunningham refused to describe the themes behind his art, how the hell does a filmmaker do the job? And how does an audience who isn’t versed in dance history make sense of it all?
Kovgan does it by showing rather than telling. She employs a troupe of dancers to re-create Cunningham’s classic choreography, from 1942 to 1972, strikingly captured by cinematographer Mko Malkhasyan. The moves are sometimes fluid and graceful, other times energetic and angular.
How it got that way, and how Cunningham developed his unique and often-imitated style is harder for Kovgan to pin down. Through archival footage and excerpts from Cunningham’s letters and diaries, she is able to chronicle the high points of Cunningham’s remarkable career — and get some of his dancers to comment on the process, through rehearsal and performance, that Cunningham used to draw from his dancers’ individual abilities to fuel his works.
One fascinating feature of Cunningham’s career that Kovgan explores is the influence of his collaborators, and Cunningham had some heavy hitters. Much of his music was composed, sometimes on the spot, by John Cage, Cunningham’s partner until Cage’s death in 1990. And the first artist to create set backdrops and costumes for the troupe was Robert Rauschenberg — and when his painting career took off, artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns stepped in.
A hole in the narrative is how little is discussed of Cunningham’s home life with Cage. That could be attributed to Kovgan relying exclusively on archival interviews, from a time when homosexual relationships weren’t talked about in public.
With so little of “Cunningham” covering his private life or his themes, it leaves a dance novice with little to grasp onto except the images of the dance itself. Experts may get a lot more out of the documentary, but the rest of us get gorgeous but inscrutable motion.
——
‘Cunningham’
★★★
Opened December 13, 2019, in select cities; opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some smoking. Running time: 93 minutes.