These days, thanks to the cornucopia of online dance classes and tutorials, you can almost imagine yourself to be a dancer. Go ahead, take morning class with Sam Black of the Mark Morris Dance Group, or follow along with New York City Ballet’s Megan Fairchild, even if you don’t have her marvelous turnout. I’ve been doing both. In the real world, it might feel intimidating; online, why not? After all, no one can see you.
But learning a solo by the modernist master Merce Cunningham? That’s another order of difficulty. Cunningham dances are like physical tongue twisters, full of tricky coordinations of the body, long balances on one foot, seemingly impossible transitions from one tilted position to another.
And yet, this is what Patricia Lent, the director of licensing at the Cunningham Trust, is proposing. In a new online series, she has been systematically breaking down Cunningham’s solo “50 Looks” into digestible slices.
With her expert guidance, even a novice like me can have a taste of the focused, structured world of a Cunningham dance. The solo is possibly his plainest, almost an ABC of his meticulous approach to subdividing the body in motion — twist, bend, reach, step. You don’t need a large area, just a few square feet. For the most part, it moves forward in space.
Ms. Lent’s delivery, captured by her husband on his phone, is pleasant and calm, a product perhaps of years spent, after retiring from the Cunningham company, as a second-grade teacher. Once in a while a black cat, Pino, paces indolently through the frame.
In many ways, learning and executing these simple steps is like a meditation, performed in silence, or to the accompaniment of Ms. Lent’s voice calling out the numbered poses: “26, 26, 32, 12, 6 into 4.”
Most of the positions are more or less erect. The first begins with a tilt to the left, with one arm curved upward; hold, and then back to center, with the other arm bent next to the ear; hold again, after which you take one step forward on the diagonal.
None of this is hard to do. In my favorite passage, you swing your body to the right with your arms extended side to side, then swing back into a shallow crouch facing the other way, torso slightly twisted, arms bent at a 90-degree angle and facing up, as if you were holding a book. (My least favorite: a balance on one leg that descends, in one count, onto the opposite knee. Ouch.)
Cunningham choreographed the series for himself, in 1979. (He was 60.) He assembled the positions using chance operations, in this case, the hexagrams of the I Ching, which determined what step, or “look,” would go first and then what would go next.
When Ms. Lent was a dancer in the company, she said, she had only the vaguest idea of how his compositional process worked. He didn’t talk about it. The chance operations — tossing dice, flipping coins, feeding data into computer program — happened before he started working with the dancers. Then he would come in and teach the choreography.
Now she has access to his notes. “He used chance as a compositional tool, not as an oracle,” Ms. Lent said via Zoom from her home in Ovid, N.Y. The open area where she works is filled with cool natural light.
As Ms. Lent explains in the first segment of her online workshop, available on the Merce Cunningham Trust’s Vimeo page and elsewhere, “there are only 50 possible looks, but the solo contains a series of 91 poses built out of these 50 possibilities.” We asked the photographer Camila Falquez to follow along, and capture the process.
There’s no internal logic to where the steps go, and yet doing it, I found that the sequence builds its own internal rhythm. Repetition made it feel almost inevitable. Some poses are repeated many times; they become reference points. Some are done in different directions, and some are left out completely.
In the online sessions, Ms. Lent shows Cunningham’s notes, pages full of numbers, funny stick figures, scratchy script, and directional arrows. A little line intersecting a circle represents the nose, facing this way or that.
There is also a film of Cunningham, undated and uncredited, in the Trust’s archives, in which he performs the sequence four times, each time reducing the pause between poses. Each iteration contains slight variations — the result, Ms. Lent explains, of memory lapses. She also makes a few mistakes in her tutorial. That’s part of the process, too.
“It’s not about being perfect,” she says on the video. “It’s about rising to the challenge of the task. The solo is an act of concentration.” For that reason, it feels like a balm at a time of constant distraction and worry.
Dancers and nondancers have been following along from all over the world. Pierina Cortiglia, a dance instructor in Buenos Aires, has posted a couple of iPhone videos of herself on Instagram, using cool black-and-white silent-movie effects available from the InShot app.
For Ms. Cortiglia, Ms. Lent’s online classes are an opportunity to access something for which she would normally need to travel. Isolation and the move to online life has leveled the playing field. Cunningham technique isn’t widely taught in Argentina; what little she was exposed to in her contemporary-dance training took place during short workshops. “I kept thinking, one day I’ll go abroad and get it from the source,” she said in an interview. Now she can do it in her dining room.
Dance students, too, have found their way to the online tutorial, sometimes through their teachers. Janet Charleston, who teaches Cunningham technique, has been including the “50 Looks” sessions in her thrice-weekly Zoom classes at Sarah Lawrence College. The students, now spread out across the country, turn off their computer cameras and work separately, before returning to discuss that day’s steps. “We have discussions about how to embody a position and about finding detail in simple shapes,” Ms. Charleston said in a phone call.
Katie Warner, one of those students, has been working on the solo in the basement of her parents’ home in Great Falls, Va. Before starting the workshop, she said in a phone interview, Cunningham technique had felt somewhat robotic in comparison with her ballet training. Working on an actual dance, no matter how simple, has helped put things into context. “There is a lot of value in tearing away all the extraneous things and just focusing on the exact position of the body,” she said. “It gives you such an exact awareness of where your body is in space, and in relation to itself.”
Learning “50 Looks” has also provided her with something deeper. “It helps me feel like I’m still learning something,” she said. “Doing remote school sometimes feels like we’re not really learning anything anymore, just sort of going through the motions.”
That feeling resonates with a lot of us in this period of disruption and isolation — and with dancers and students of dance in particular. “Doing ‘50 Looks,’” Ms. Warner said, “has helped make things feel a little less bleak.”
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