Modern Stories
For classically trained ballet dancers, modern dance can be both risky and empowering
Dancers spring, spin, tilt and teeter across the stage in Scenario, Merce Cunningham’s 1997 creation with Commes des Garçons designer Kei Kawakubo. Cunningham’s signature powerful movement quality coupled with clever choreography at once amuses and astonishes. Ballet’s classical lines and body coordinations are flipped and twisted, and the dancers are neutral, extraordinary pedestrians moving in ways possible only through a highly technical practice.
Last summer, Vail audiences were treated to the unusual partnership between American Ballet Theatre’s Herman Cornejo and former Cunningham dancer Melissa Toogood in an excerpted duet from the iconic modern dance. For this year’s Festival, Toogood, who travels the country dancing and reviving Cunningham masterpieces, will restage a larger portion of Scenario involving several other duets featuring dancers from both ballet and modern backgrounds.
Cornejo’s boundless jumps are always exhilarating, but even more so when framed by the dramatic pauses and quirky steps characteristic of Cunningham’s work. His leaps explode from nowhere in the same unpredictable manner with which Toogood seems to carry herself across the stage in a single step. Dancing together, the two literally depend on each other to stay standing, precariously leaning back so far that if a single hand should slip, both would go tumbling.
This summer, Toogood, who travels the country dancing and reviving Cunningham masterpieces, will restage a larger portion of Scenario involving several other duets of dancers from both ballet and modern backgrounds.
“What I chose to stage [on Cornejo] was made for a dancer who was a huge risk-taker,” explains explains Toogood about for why she imagined Cornejo him excelling in the role. Contrary to the quest for perfection that drives classical ballet, the risk-taking central to Cunningham’s work involves accepting and embracing imperfections that arise. “To stumble, to potentially have a line not look perfect. It can be scary!” Toogood says. “But I’d rather fall over than take it safe.”
Allowing imperfection was new for Cornejo, who The New York Times has described as “virtuosic,” and “miraculous,” and “an impulsive force of nature”. He noted that imperfections make the individual, which in turn makes the dance, particularly when there is no story to explicitly portray. “I had to work to accept those imperfections, to be comfortable with them and to create art as a consequence of them.” This discovery allows him to approach the piece with a fresh perspective this summer.
“It’s the dancer who makes the work come across,” says Toogood. “Merce was very open to what each individual would bring to the material — he didn’t discriminate against movement.”
Scenario will be one of many of the modern dance works featured at the Festival this summer. Pam Tanowitz— who has been described as “one of the most formally brilliant choreographers around” (The New York Times)— will present her newest work, Blueprint, to the music of Leonard Bernstein Composer-in-Residence Caroline Shaw. The piece will feature former Miami City Ballet principal Patricia Delgado alongside two Juilliard-trained modern dancers, Jason Collins and Victor Lozano.
Delgado and Tanowitz first worked together last summer after sharing a car ride from Denver to Vail. Sensing strong artistic chemistry, Tanowitz spontaneously asked Artistic Director Damian Woetzel if she could create a solo piece for Delgado. Woetzel agreed and the result was a witty, upbeat and musical creation in which Delgado was praised for being “elegant, wholly unpredictable, commandingly playful” (The New York Times).
“What I love about Pam,” says Delgado, “is that she brings out a strong and independent woman in me in her work.” Tanowitz’s process stems from discovery and does not rely on a constructed character to carry the dancer or the audience away. Delgado “had to work at stripping away the ballerina way of carrying a posture, of always performing,” in order to be purely herself on stage.
“Our lives already have so many stories!” Delgado exclaims as she recounts the challenge of tempering back her dramatic expressiveness. “Modern dance can be like meditation. It can inspire clarity and be transcendent because it’s not driven by beginning, middle and end.” Such clarity invites the audience to bring their own stories and interpretations.
Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, who both danced alongside Toogood in the Cunningham company, layer many narratives upon complicated and abstract personal stories. The pair last performed their cheeky duet Desire Liar at the Festival in 2016. “We were trying to portray that we are two men in a romantic relationship as collaborators,” Riener says, “and the interesting tensions and humor that come out of that.”
Through a lens of abstraction, the modern choreographers embed stories within their work, allowing for audiences to experience the “multifaceted, complex, ambiguous portrayal of how we live in the world.”
Whether stripped away or radically layered, modern dance encourages letting go of expectations—there is no single correct interpretation. Instead, it offers audiences and dancers alike the freeing experience of reveling in the art of individuality.