A Letter to Merce
"Woodbox," New Mexico, July 28, 2009
Dear Merce,
First, thank you for demonstrating something original and difficult: a committed life!
I learned of your passing from a text message sent by Jean Davidson, our Executive Director, first thing yesterday morning as I was still in bed in this little one room house sitting amidst the sagebrush and the skies here on the mesa of Northern New Mexico.
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I need to say something... What, I am not sure.
Later, Janet Wong, my Associate Artistic Director, in another text message said simply in her characteristically precise way, "I am at Merce's studio." I responded eagerly with, "What's happening? Ever since I heard the news, it is as if I have been holding my breath." And so it was all day.
Still later, over dinner with four local friends who have no idea who or what you are, I blurted out that I was feeling a hole torn in my world.
Please forgive me for making you a landmark in the landscape - a fine, singular, curiously shaped tree perhaps. Yes, you are the landmark many of us use to get our bearings, measure ourselves against, or sometimes, to take refuge under.
Thank you for your personal aloofness and the generosity of your output, as dependable as sun or rain in a world where seasons are evermore unpredictable. Your dance making was so legible and recognizable that many of us who came after you could only define ourselves in how much we adhered to or rejected your example.
As I could not be with Janet yesterday in your studio, I sat in my small house watching Beach Birds For Camera. Looking at the cool eccentricity of your company and composition, I tried not to think about the pile of text materials on my lap for Fondly Do We Hope... Fervently Do We Pray, the commemorative work I have been asked to create for the Ravinia Festival and Illinois' Bicentennial Commission in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln.
After a year or more of experimenting with movement, text and music with my company and collaborators, after many interviews and speeches about the "Great Man" and his elusive meaning in my life, I feel a bit disoriented as somehow it does not all fall together effortlessly and persuasively... and the premiere looms!
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We have led our experimentation with movement and tirelessly attempted to build a welcoming environment for it with text (Lincoln's and others) and music (that Lincoln might have known and original) so that the work is as much, if not more, about us and the time we live in as about the era of the Civil War.
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The weighty pile on my lap as I watched Beach Birds contained these numerous biographies. They are for the most part thoughtful and sincere, but do not amount to an arresting portrait of my world in dialogue with the mirage that is "His world." The poetry is not in what our community thinks as individuals in response to an idea or group of ideas of which Lincoln, racial politics, constitutional law and history are but a few. I have to face the fact that my own jumbled feelings come closest to expressing what I want this work to do, but even they seem lacking.
Looking at your Beach Birds through these circumstances and questions brought no revelation, but did soothe in its own way. Long ago you decided on a restricted palette, a rigorous and exclusive path of investigation. Yours is not a social statement. One could say it is a highly aloof and alienated point of view that does not speak, but provides an exquisite opportunity for looking and reflection. Do I really care who your dancers are? Not really. Do I care what they think? No, not really. Do I wonder about your personal feelings, about our messy civil discourse? Yes, but you don't seem to want to share that with me. And still I am fed.
I thank you for your prodigious output and the simple truth, which could be a question, a text message from you to me, which asks:
"What will you do now?
What is worth doing and how?"
Thank you, Merce.
Goodbye,
Bill T. Jones.
Remembering Merce
Bill T. Jones remembers Cunningham and his influence on dance in an interview with Neal Conan of National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation. Click here to hear the interview and read the transcript.
-- Bill T. Jones (Tuesday, July 28, 2009)
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