Merce Cunningham Dance Company in "Roaratorio" at BAM, photo by Julieta Cervantes

One of my college professors told me that letting your eyes focus in different ways while watching dance can offer endless enlightenment. Zoom in on something, then zoom out, or let everything blur together and then come into focus.  I tried this approach many times while watching Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform Roaratorio on December 7th at BAM.  Whether everything was crystal clear or swirling together, I was mesmerized from start to finish.  The company’s Legacy Tour comes to an end on December 31st, but this was my very last Cunningham performance.  I was clinging to everything on stage – the colors, the sounds, the dancers’ gorgeous lines and shapes and patterns, the eerily beautiful, disorienting score by John Cage. It was momentous, riveting, and then all too soon, over.

I haven’t enjoyed everything I’ve seen by Cunningham, and the first few performances I saw by his company several years ago left me confused, perhaps even irritated. But with every performance that I’ve watched, I’ve felt more and more certain of two things: 1. These dances are extraordinary and unlike anything else, and 2. Cunningham is the most groundbreaking choreographer of our time, and absolutely brilliant. On the 7th, it was exciting to witness such a monumental performance, and simultaneously heartbreaking to witness the end of the company at a time when I’m so eager to see more of Cunningham, to keep reveling in his brilliance.

Created in 1983, Roaratorio pulls from Irish step dancing and is inspired by James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”.  This lively, textured work shows couples coming together for festive social dancing featuring rapid footwork fused with dramatic tilts of the torso.  The stage was busy yet clean, with dancers moving at different tempos or joining others to build something new altogether.  John Cage’s richly layered 1979 score, ”Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake,” is remarkable on its own, but even more beautiful when paired with Cunningham’s choreography.  Sounds from everyday life – a crying baby, traffic, a leaky faucet – blend with traditional Irish music.  I strained my ears at times to identify the different sounds, to determine where one sound ended and another began. Running through the mesmerizing soundscape was text from “Finnegan’s Wake”, adding yet another dimension. Like Cunningham’s movement, the score was busy but never messy.  It felt like a long, hazy memory – or strands from many memories – that was strikingly reflected in the lighting design by Mark Lancaster and Christine Shallenberg. At one moment the dancers are bathed in sunlight, at another shadows are cast across their faces. Whether encompassing a whole day, a week, or a year, Roaratorio reflects the passing of time.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company in "Roaratorio" at BAM, photo by Julieta Cervantes

Jacob’s Pillow, located in Becket, Massachusetts, has extensive on-site archives that allow visitors to view rare footage from dance performances — but you have to travel to Becket to view them.  Virtual Pillow, which offers a series of digital dance programming for online audiences (such as PillowTalks), was an excellent step in the right direction to make their programs more widely accessible.  On March 28^th, the Pillow will launch Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive, its most extensive Virtual Pillow program to date. Dance Interactive is a curated online portal of select artists who have performed at Jacob’s Pillow from 1937 through 2010. The collection features performance video and corresponding insight about the artists and works.  All videos were filmed at Jacob’s Pillow over the past 70+ years – and these aren’t videos that you can find on YouTube.

Although the general public can access Dance Interactive on March 28^th, I was fortunate to get a press preview of the new tool.  Searching by genre, era, or artist makes it incredibly user-friendly.  Once I let it sink in that I was watching Maria Tallchief perform George Balanchine’s Firebird at the Pillow in 1951, I realized how unique Dance Interactive is – and how fortunate the public will be to have this at their fingertips.  It’s also incredibly addictive.  To give you an idea, I watched excerpts of the following, one after the other:

• Merce Cunningham in Banjo (1955)
• Pearl Primus in Spirituals (1950)
• Wendy Whelan and Peter Boal in William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman (2004)
• José Limón in Doris Humphrey’s Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1946)
• Members of the Royal Danish Ballet in August Bournonville’s in Konservatoriet (1955)

It’s a treat to marvel at these performances and get some background on the artists’ relationship with the Pillow.  If you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for, you can click “Dive In”, which randomly selects an entry from the archives.  And if you’re in the mood to test your knowledge, clicking “Guess” will show a video and ask the viewer to choose who the performer is from several options.  This leads to information about the performance – who choreographed it, when it was performed at the Pillow, and more.

I’m eager for the public to start using Dance Interactive (watch choreographer Kyle Abraham getting a preview of the tool below), and hopefully there will be a lively online discussion about it.  Mark your calendars for the 28^th!  But for now, I’ll simply say thank you, Jacob’s Pillow, for making your archives accessible to people worldwide in an intelligent, informed way.  Not only will students, educators, and dance audiences benefit from this curated resource.  Dance Interactive is also a welcomed resource for the field – artists, choreographers, dancers, and historians will find this endlessly rewarding.

“The dramatic defection of the Kirov Ballet’s Rudolf Nureyev to the West is just one pivotal event in the colorful history of ballet. Jennifer Homans follows ballet across continents and through time from its beginnings as an elegant Western European court art to its elaboration under the Russian tsars to its high-water mark in America and the USSR during the cold war. Learn why ballet was not only artistic, but political, bound up with the fate of kings, courts and states.”

$16 tickets to this event can be purchased online.  92Y Tribeca is located at 200 Hudson Street, between Vestry and Desbrosses Streets.

Irine Fokine, photo by Chris Peters for NorthJersey.com

On December 5^th, Irine Fokine died at the age of 88.  She was the founder of Irine Fokine School of Ballet in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where for over sixty years countless students and I trained in a rigorous, disciplined environment.  Ms. Fokine is the niece of choreographer Michel Fokine, and her mother, Alexandra Fedorova, was a prima ballerina at the Maryinsky Theater in Russia.  Irine moved to the United States in 1938, and she danced for many years before establishing her school.  Her school’s annual Nutcracker was produced for the last fifty-two years, and was the performance highlight for her students (I have vivid memories of rehearsing for and performing myriad roles in her production…year after year after year).

Ms. Fokine was a strict disciplinarian and as a teacher, she meant business.  I considered myself lucky that she never made me cry – a common occurrence among the younger ballet students.  But her rigorous approach stemmed from her passion for and dedication to classical ballet.  She devoted her life to it, and her school stayed open until this past August, when she decided to close the school and retire.  It’s a bit spooky that she died so shortly after closing the studio – it was so much a part of who she was that it’s as if she couldn’t live on without it.  Also, December was usually her busiest month as she frantically prepared for her school’s Nutcracker, so it’s ironic – yet perhaps fitting – that she passed away at this time.

I heard from another one of Fokine’s students that she said, “I’ve lived my life exactly the way I wanted to.  Now all I have to do is go to hell for it.”  Indeed, she was quite the character.  Ms. Fokine will be deeply missed by me and the many individuals who studied with her.  She shared her tremendous love of dance and passion for artistic excellence with so many students, and she’ll always be remembered.

For more on Irine Fokine, read Editor in Chief of Dance Magazine Wendy Perron’s reflections on her time as a student at the school.