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Review: A Lost Merce Cunningham Dance Solo, Found

Silas Riener performing Merce Cunningham’s “Changeling” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.Credit...Liza Voll

BOSTON — Merce Cunningham, one of the greatest dancers of the last century, was by all accounts at his most personal and driven in a series of three extraordinary 1950s solos he made to music by Christian Wolff. In these he was, he said, “concerned with the possibility of containment and explosion being instantaneous”; and he used dance language he gave to no other dancer.

The title of the last one, “Changeling” (1957), hints at a meaning the dance had for him; he was so unlike his family that he told his colleague Carolyn Brown that he felt he must have been a changeling. But he ceased dancing the solo in 1964; and it was long assumed that it and the other Wolff solos were lost. Last year, however, a 1958 German TV film of “Changeling” was discovered by the researcher and filmmaker Alla Kovgan. That film makes a remarkable effect — Cunningham is literally larger than life — as part of “Leap Before You Look,” an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art here devoted to the experimental work in the arts done at Black Mountain College from 1933 to 1957.

Imaginative camerawork begins with a breathtaking close-up of Cunningham’s feet: He beats one foot against the ankle of the other. Even the beats — like those of a wingtip — are modulated. Later, when he tilts back, creating a huge diagonal with his arms and torso, the scale of his dancing is immense.

Dance on film is one thing, in live performance another. “Changeling” has now also been reconstructed by the former Cunningham dancers Silas Riener and Jean Freebury; Mr. Riener gave his first public performance of it at the official opening of the exhibition on Tuesday, accompanied by the pianist Aaron Likness. It’s extraordinary to see “Changeling” twice in the same evening, in performances 57 years apart.

Mr. Riener does a superb job. He’s not Cunningham, his dynamics are less startling than those on the film, and he does not inflect its movements as yet as if from vital need. Yet you can’t take your eyes off him. He inhabits “Changeling”; it never looks like alien terrain. Cunningham is the greater dancer, but Mr. Riener grows by tackling this. And one immediate advantage of live performance is the shock of seeing that “Changeling” is by no means black and white. Thanks to Robert Rauschenberg’s costume, it’s richly red-on-red, including a V-neck woolen sweater whose numerous perforations are a fascination in their own right, and a peculiar bonnet.

The solo — never less than intense, never remotely orthodox — is a study in contradictions; its motto might be “I contain multitudes.” Sweepingly large arm gestures are sometimes followed by rapid flickers of the fingers. Legs crossed at the knee make a slow crablike sideways walk (with hands crossed tight behind the back). High jumps, on arrival, immediately have the dancer lying flat on the floor.

At no point can you tell how a phrase will end. In a single implacable legato sequence, a look upward under a raised arm leads not up but down, as the legs and torso lower the dancer into an almost flattened squat. At several points, it’s as if he becomes an unknown species.

This reconstruction opens the issue of reviving dances inextricably associated with their originator. Several who saw Cunningham dance his solos felt they were so personal that they should never be danced by anyone else. Cunningham seems to have felt the same — until his old age, when he assisted in the reconstruction of his 1944 solo “Totem Ancestor” and coached more than one young dancer in it. I’ve long hoped that Rashaun Mitchell would dance “Solo” (1975), in which Cunningham became an entire bestiary. Cunningham’s solos are rich material. It’s to be hoped that, for generations who never saw him dance, more of them may be returned to the stage.

“Changeling” will be performed 16 times between Nov. 12 and Jan. 24 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston; icaboston.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Cunningham Solo, With Multitudes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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