Cunningham’s influence remains vital

July 25, 2009|Janine Parker, Globe Correspondent

BECKET - It’s so fitting that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s performances at Jacob’s Pillow happen right smack in the middle of the festival’s schedule. One can imagine Cunningham sitting for a photograph as the patriarch of modern dance, surrounded by all the other younger choreographers and dancers who are appearing at the Pillow this summer. Whether or not they’ve worked for him, the majority of them have been influenced by the nonagenarian master.

Oh, the lessons we’ve learned and the lessons we keep trying to learn from the unfailingly unsentimental Cunningham. One slippery thesis is his longtime insistence that the elements of a traditional dance - the music, the costumes, the dancing itself - are separate entities that should be able to exist as such. So his composers and designers are given numbers - how long and how many dancers - and that’s it. The viewer is challenged to reconsider what musicality really means.

Well, one tenet of musicality is that it comes from within the dancer and manifests itself in the dancer’s ability to shape his or her movements fully into the time allotted - whatever the tempo, and whether that time is filled with melody, earsplittingly shriekish sounds, or silence. Despite Cunningham’s iconic presence as a great innovator of 20th-century modern dance, his diabolical movement requires a sturdy grounding in ballet technique, even if many of those sky-high battements and balances and pirouettes are capped by a flexed foot and turned-in leg. Technical virtuosity is a given, and there is no room for personal flourishes. Cunningham dancers must be iconoclastic in their approach to musicality and willing to sacrifice luxuriousness.

The Pillow program, which celebrates Cunningham’s 90th birthday, is a sampling that allows us to consider the spirit of his strange and wonderful oeuvre, his collaboration with other equally unapologetic artists, and his interest in the technological world. The 1993 “CRWDSPCR’’ (pronounced crowdspacer) is one of the first dances Cunningham made using the computer program Danceforms, which helps him map out his dancers’ patterns. One could call Cunningham’s stage action random or even chaotic, but a quick inventory of the various groupings indicates meticulous, almost obsessive phrases.