Merce Cunningham, l'homme qui a réinventé la danse

Le Figaro

«Plutôt que de tâtonner en assemblant les choses et de s'estimer au final insatisfait, il vaut mieux s'en remettre au hasard. En plus, c'est un moyen de faire apparaître des combinaisons auxquelles on n'aurait pas pensé. En fait, je crois que le hasard rend les idées plus claires et ouvre l'imagination»

«La danse ne vous donne rien en retour, ni manuscrit à vendre, ni peinture à mettre sur les murs, ni poème à imprimer, rien que cette sensation unique de se sentir vivant»

Surnommé l'"Einstein" de la danse, Cunningham a dynamité dès les années 50 les codes du ballet : le danseur ne se déplace plus en fonction du centre de la scène, il est lui-même un centre. "Au contraire du danseur classique, j'estime tous les mouvements possibles", expliquait-il.

"El azar siempre ha sido esencial. A veces no he podido tomar decisiones y he optado por tirar una moneda al aire y seguir lo que ella ha dicho. Es liberador, porque al dejar que sea otra cosa la que decide por ti, tu vida entra en caminos inesperados".

En 1955, Merce escribía en Impermanent art: "La devoción por la danza es un instantáneo y agradable acto de vida".

It took many years before Mr. Cunningham achieved celebrity as an independent choreographer. Perhaps this long period of relative obscurity allowed him to experiment. Like Cage and other composers, as well as several painters, he began to play with chance as a compositional tool. He used the I-Ching in particular, but other chance methods, too, like cards and dice, to determine which parts of the body would be used, which directions, what parts of the stage, how many dancers. The point had nothing to do with improvisation; Cunningham choreography was very precisely made. Rather, he wanted to banish predictable compositional habits.

The I-Ching is the Book of Changes, and Mr. Cunningham’s choreography became an expression of the nature of change itself. He altered images onstage without narrative sequence or psychological causation, and the audience was allowed to watch dance as one might watch successive events in a landscape or on a street corner.

Though his choreography often featured qualities of attack and conflict, it also expressed a Zen kind of acceptance. Mr. Cunningham had always been a superlative dance soloist, but he created a dance theater in which the basic condition was soloism. Even in a duet or a trio, each dancer retained marked degrees of independence and detachment; ensembles often showed three or more different dance activities co-existing onstage; and solos revealing individuality and self-discovery abounded.