Robert Greskovic has received the Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship twice in his career as a writer, educator, and dance historian. In this blog post, Robert discusses a topic that interested him during the fellowship cycle in which he focused on Merce Cunningham: the tender relationship between Cunningham and John Cage, and the evolution of the piece, Pictures, highlighting the visual elements of the footwork, but also the set  and costume design.  

For Christmas of 1984, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) presented a notebook of choreographic notations to his lifetime and artistic partner, musician and composer John Cage (1912-1992). The dedication, in Cunningham's handwriting, says: A PICTURES BOOK, FOR JC, XMAS 1984. Its pages plot, by way of arrows and lines, the action and, by way of stick figures, the stillnesses of Pictures, the 29-minute dance that had its premiere on the stage of New York's City Center 35 years ago this month.

The original of this spiral bound sketchbook, which was issued in a 2012 limited facsimile edition, is held in the archives of the John Cage Trust; almost all other documents related to Cunningham's eye-filling dance are now held in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, as part of its Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation Collections, primarily in a "Dance Capsule," as the Cunningham Trust calls its documentation of individual Cunningham dances. These capsules, containing carefully arranged audio, video, pictorial, and written information related to 86 dances for which detailed documentation now exists, are available to researchers on an individual basis.

As a recent Dance Research Fellow, I was granted access to these capsule holdings as well as other documents related to Cunningham's life and work. My chosen area of interest in a year celebrating the centenary of Cunningham's birth was the visual design elements of select works in the choreographer's catalog of some 188 dances. The visual aspects of Cunningham's dances, by which I mean other than those embodied by their all-important choreographic dynamics, range widely and impressively over a roster of designers: 48 for costume, 57 for set, and 25 for lighting.

In the case of Pictures, one name identifies the art of its visual design elements: Mark Lancaster. Lancaster, an English-born artist and set designer, came to Cunningham’s artistic team in 1975, eventually becoming artistic advisor, succeeding Jasper Johns, for whom the Englishman served as studio assistant. Pictures comes 18th in a line of Cunningham works for which Lancaster provided designs; in this case, he has credit for costume, set, and lighting. The set aspect is essentially a component of Lancaster's lighting scheme, by way of a double-layered cyclorama that gives the stage a luminous expanse, struck along the way of the dance six different times to produce silhouette effects in which the stage lights go out as the background ones remain bright.

Cunningham was famously reticent about explicating any specific, intended, dramatic aim to his dances' activities within the context of their visual surround. In the instance of Pictures, it remains reliable to say, thanks to the existence of written materials in the Cunningham archives, that the dance consists of 64 posed, paused moments, i.e. the individual "pictures" in Pictures. All of these eye-catching and often eye-filling moments arrive, and subsequently evolve into others, by as many movement arrangements devised along the way. On the evidence of the album gifted to Cage, it's fair to say the dance, one of 133 dances at this point, was somehow special to the choreographer or, at least perhaps, that he knew it was especially notable to Cage.

Lancaster's contribution to dressing and lighting the cast of 15, including Cunningham himself, was to color the stage and its dancers in an array of intense blues and in dusky charcoal grays. Striking hues remained a hallmark of Lancaster's painterly eye. Fractions, from 1978 revealed a stage aglow in a rainbow of pastel colors; Trails, from 1982, presented a vibrant world in which intense reds were mated with lively grays. Pictures carried forward Lancaster's vision of memorable chroma.

The cut of Lancaster's costuming for Pictures continued, with a slight twist, a scheme begun with Inlets, from 1977, in which Morris Graves's seemingly uniform costume designs, distinguished, for the first time, Cunningham's somewhat separate part among the consistently younger dancers in his dances, in a slight variant on the way the other dancers were costumed. Thus, for Inlets, Cunningham wore fitted sweatpants rather than the similarly colored tights worn by the dance's three women and two other men.

Although Cunningham's abiding preference was for his dancers to be dressed in ways that allowed their choreographed movements to be seen without undue obstruction, there remained within what might strike the eye as a unisex look, a sometimes delicate distinction for how the work's female dancers were distinguished from their male counterparts. With somewhat consistent regularity, where the simple, body-revealing look of leotard-with-tights appeared as an identical way of dressing the women and men, there was a subtle gender-specific difference. The women wore their almost-always footless tights under their leotards and the men wore theirs over, making for a uniform but not-quite-unisex costuming scheme.

For Pictures, Lancaster dressed everyone in a combination that paired charcoal leotard tops with trim, blue pants, cuffed in black for lower body costuming. All the dancers in this instance wore the legging portion of their costumes over the leotard part. In this way, none of the younger dancers working alongside the older Cunningham had leg-wear revealing their more lissome limbs.

With Cunningham, one rarely, if ever, knows where his individual works stand in his own mind. Those around him have long hinted, from observation at various distances, that once a dance was finally put on stage by way of what might be called a "collaboration of independent individual artists"—that is, wherein the elements of music, set, costume and lighting meet the choreography only at the premiere—that one could surmise what the choreographer finally thought of the end result by noting how it lasted in repertory. In this view, if a work ultimately failed to tickle Cunningham's fancy, it would be seen little or no more beyond its premiere. In some instances, dances were given further life by presenting their choreographic elements, more or less anew, in the context of what Cunningham called "Events," which consisted of excerpts of repertory works performed with visual and musical elements arranged just for the time and space of the "Event."

Pictures remained in rotating repertory from its 1984 premiere until 1991; it was then revived in 2002 before being again taken out of repertory in 2005. In his February New York Public Library lecture, Merce Cunningham: Life and Art, Cunningham scholar, critic, and writer Alastair Macaulay opened his talk with a 1987 film of Pictures; eventually, working the 1984 work into his chronological presentation, Macaulay recalled that when seeing Pictures in the company of Irish historian and dance critic Deirdre McMahon, she remarked how the recurring groupings of male and female dancers resembled designs from the Book of Kells. Macaulay concluded this train of thought by noting that "during the 1980s, the years when Cunningham was working on Roaratorio [subtitled: an Irish Circus Based on Finnegan's Wake, his marvelous, 1983 dance for nine women and seven men, including Cunningham, complete with complementarily marvelous designs of many colors by Lancaster] and Cage on Irish drumming, it often seemed that in their work all roads led to Ireland."

Ireland. Ancient manuscript illuminations. Specific pictorial images, such as the one from Pictures that inspired How to Walk an Elephant, an unmemorable, 1985 dance with choreography by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. All such takeaways result from seeing Pictures. All these and more can be seen in Cunningham's mesmerizingly evolving dance, but none can be said to be actually intended by its dancemaker. As he said to Joan Acocella for her 1996 article "Cunningham's Recent Work: Does It Tell a Story?" with regard to viewers' seeing this or that intended image in his dances: "It's just in their eyes."

All we in the audience have to do is keep our eyes peeled and let Cunningham's pictures beguile us.