Since Merce Cunningham's death in 2009, a wealth of material has been made available for researchers in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPLPA). Carrie Noland's Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary (2020) is the first book to make use of these materials and, in so doing, marks a key turning point for understandings of Cunningham. She intervenes in a vast collection of scholarship on him that interprets his work as indifferent, abstract, and a refusal of meaning. Instead, Noland argues that Cunningham's dances stage human dramas, multiply desire and interest, particularize the human body, and, most importantly, contain meaning in the movement itself (2). She supports this argument with a close examination of Cunningham's “procedures” to make dances. These procedures expose the ways in which he sought to create and represent spatial and affective relations even when building them from arbitrary encounters between dancers.
The material housed in the Merce Cunningham Archive at NYPLPA is central in Noland's text and dictates her scope, methods, and methodologies. She examines his works across the second half of the twentieth century with attention to how artists in the twenty-first century have taken up Cunningham's legacy. In addition to archival research, she conducts interviews with former Merce Cunningham Dance Company members and attends rehearsals of recent reconstructions of his work. Noland's expertise in literary criticism surfaces in her close readings of choreographic notes and procedures from the archive as texts rife with meaning. His work is addressed through a lens of theater and theatricality, which also serves as a departure from previous Cunningham scholarship. When assessing his artistic influences, Noland similarly weighs how they fed his sense of theater.
Noland defines theater for Cunningham as a “theatre of relations, rather than a choreography of discontinuities” (9). This definition is premised on the assumption that he made important decisions before or after chance operations, which transformed chance-derived choreographies into a coherent work. Cunningham's dances are examined in relation to his “gestural semiotics (a semiotics of ambiguity); his relational ontology (an ontology of the combinatorial); and his aesthetic humanism (an aesthetic attentive to how ‘each person’ is ‘self-expressive’—and ‘extraordinarily so’)” (8). This lens enables Noland to craft a nuanced analysis of Cunningham's use of theater techniques to maximize the “dramatic potential” of his work (9).
The first two chapters form the basis for Noland's considerations of modularity and inscription in Cunningham's work. Chapter 1, “Recycling the Readymade,” takes up the relationship between the arbitrary and the necessary in Cunningham's Walkaround Time (1968). She examines the piece alongside Marcel Duchamp's aesthetic for recycling and repetition in visual art and its influence on Cunningham. Noland analyzes how this modular approach impacted Walkaround Time and ties it to the importance of preservation of dance phrases for Cunningham not in notation, but in composition. In chapter 2, “Summerspace,” Cunningham's investments in inscriptive practices are explored, including what he referred to as “paperwork”— handwritten and procedure-oriented mark making—and DanceForms—computer-assisted choreography. Through an analysis of Summerspace (1958) and Biped (1999), Noland demonstrates how inscription functioned as more than commemorative notation for Cunningham. Rather, these acts of writing fed his imagination and allowed composition and performance to remain both distinct and grafted onto one another. In both of these beginning chapters, Noland explicates the generative role that modules of dance played in Cunningham's acts of recycling, replication, and inscriptive processes.
The next two chapters move from an attention to chance operations and inscriptive processes as a way out of literary or dramatic associations to a focus on Cunningham's use of dramatic genres and representational tactics, however subtle, in his work. In chapter 3, “Nine Permanent Emotions and Sixteen Dances,” Noland examines Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951) and Antic Meet (1958). Sixteen Dances demonstrates Cunningham's uses of rasa theory from the Natya Sastra as well as his early training in the Stanislavsky acting technique. Antic Meet shows his use of vaudeville. Noland contends that chance operations allowed for a delicate inclusion of these dramatic genres. Moreover, she argues that this subtle use of drama and representation can be found in much of Cunningham's repertoire. Chapter 4, “Passion in Slow Motion,” examines how Cunningham suspended dramatic moments through techniques drawn from studio-shot photography. A close reading of Suite for Five (1953–1958) demonstrates Cunningham's use of the static documentation of movement as a choreographic and dramatic tool.
Noland uses her final three chapters to further her argument for the presence of meaning in Cunningham's dances by focusing on his stagings of human relationships and cultural difference. In chapter 5, “Bound and Unbound,” Crises (1960) and a 2014 reconstruction offer a site from which to assess Cunningham's staging of the human relations among his dancers for dramatic purposes. These insights suggest that the dance relied so much on the relationships between the choreographer and his dancers that attempts to reconstruct it enact another kind of relationship between those later dancers and Cunningham. In chapter 6, “The Ethnics of Vaudeville, the Rhythms of Roaratorio,” Noland revises previous dance scholars’ interpretations of Cunningham as neutral by arguing that he contended with ethnic and racial difference through his use of rhythm. She analyzes Antic Meet and Roaratorio (1983) to make a case that by divorcing music from dance, he complicated assignations of culturally specific rhythms onto certain bodies, and that his use of rhythmic quotations signaled an ethnically marked history.
Noland's final chapter, “Buddhism in Theatre,” traces how Cunningham and his life and artistic partner John Cage addressed issues of relationality in their converging and diverging aesthetic practices. Particular attention is paid to one of their “Dialogue” genre performances (1978) as a way to unpack how their work together in these pieces depended not only on their individual personalities, “but also on the personality of the relation between them” (191). She concludes by using an anecdote from the rehearsal process for Summerspace to succinctly reiterate one of the book's overall arguments, namely, “Cunningham chose to engage in a dramaturgical process that encouraged the development of the very connections his choreographic process aimed to break” (200). These last chapters deftly use a vast range of archival materials to demonstrate the multiplicity of formal, dramaturgical, and personal ways in which he both built and obfuscated connections, meanings, and relationships in his work.
Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary provides a first glimpse into layers of meaning in Cunningham's work that only his recently available archive at NYPLPA allows. Noland counters previous scholarship, which she terms “critical dogma on Cunningham” (71), notably including work by Jill Johnston (Reference Johnston1963), Susan Leigh Foster (Reference Foster1986), and Roger Copeland (Reference Copeland2004). She challenges previous scholarly assertions that Cunningham's work employed an aesthetic of abstraction, indifference, and a refusal of meaning. She also pushes further on underlying meanings in Cunningham's dances than previous scholars’ assessments of a perceived depersonalization as a way to closet his homosexuality during the Lavender Scare, including the works of Gay Morris (Reference Morris2006) and Rebekah Kowal (Reference Kowal2010). Her analysis of Cunningham's attention to ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and autobiography develops arguments by Foster (Reference Foster and Desmond2001) and Daniel Callahan (Reference Callahan2018). Noland's significant contribution to the field calls for a fresh look not only at Cunningham, but also at the relationship between modern dance, theater, and abstraction. Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary is surely the first of many more works that will mine the Merce Cunningham Archive at NYPLPA to engage in revisionary projects.
