On the wall leading into the Museum of Contemporary Art’s forthcoming "Merce Cunningham: Common Time," there is a kind of name cloud depicting the choreographer’s many collaborators during his long, influential and prescient career.
It might as well be the roster for a modern art museum. You could make a compelling one out of work by the people Cunningham worked with, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol, Martha Graham and the dancer’s life partner, the avant-garde composer John Cage.
They and many more are represented in "Common Time," which opens Saturday at the MCA, a major retrospective incorporating floor-to-ceiling set designs, provocative costume arrays, a full-gallery multimegascreen video installation, and, above all, recordings and live performances of the dances that earned Cunningham his reputation for innovation and for attracting talent.
"Cunningham in my view is the most influential of any dance-maker in modern time," said Philip Bither, senior curator and director of performing arts at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, which is mounting a simultaneous presentation of "Common Time." "His importance is viewed beyond that and into the broader world of the arts in general. You could even argue he helped make dance a true art form … something that was on par with other forms of visual art or literature or film."
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"For contemporary, avant-garde, 20th-century innovation, he’s the absolute top," said Lynne Warren, curator of the MCA exhibit.
Warren walked a visitor through the exhibition-in-progress on the museum’s fourth floor early this week. The screens were still blank, the speakers silent. Few of the lights blazed with the theatrical precision they will display when it is officially open.
Still, you could see the scope of things, the journey from early work to later, the relentless sharing of the stage, the epic Rauschenberg backdrops, the presentation of material from the Cunningham archive at the Walker alongside works by his collaborators, the Cunningham timeline for those who demand biographical grounding.
You could also scan the show’s ambitious catalog and find a quote from Cunningham — raised in Washington state, lived and worked in New York City — that seems to handicap such an effort from the outset: "More than the museum I like the actuality," he wrote.
And so the exhibitions will present actuality, a comprehensive dance and lecture schedule. Cunningham famously commanded that his company disband after his death (which came in 2009), but curators are bringing in former Cunningham dancers along with video collaborator Charles Atlas and some of the companies that still perform Cunningham works. (Find the schedules at www.mcachicago.org and www.walkerart.org.)
"When you carve out a goal to celebrate one of the most influential choreographers of our time, how do you not deal with the body?" asked Bither of the Walker. "People won’t get the full picture if they don’t go to any of the live events."
Cunningham’s notion of actuality, too, is implicit in the exhibition title. In making his dances, he would have dancers, composer and set designer come together to present distinctive art that, in occupying a common time, becomes something new and potentially more powerful.
"Imitating the way nature makes a space and puts lots of things in it, heavy and light, little and big, all unrelated, yet each affecting all the others," Cunningham wrote.
"His innovation is (that) his dance is removed from being set to music, from telling a story," Warren said. "Sometimes the dancers had never heard the music or seen the decor until the rehearsal.
"This is the way a lot of artists are working today. That’s one of the reasons we’re so excited to have the show here."
Bither, too, sees Cunningham’s anticipation of the present, from embracing technology to opening his arms to other artists, as an essential part of his greatness.
"Dance is such an ephemeral form," he said. "Merce was one of the greats, but he’s been gone for a while. People sometimes wonder, does he still matter now? Who should care and why?"
The answer? "He was so ahead of his time and so forward-thinking that it feels very current and very prescient, the kind of work he made. People are mixing up what they’re doing all the time. We’re living in this interdisciplinary age. Cunningham and Cage were doing that 50 years ago."
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
When: Feb. 11-April 30 (Chicago); through July 30 (Minneapolis).
Where: MCA Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place.
Tickets: Included with general admission; www.mcachicago.org, www.walkerart.org
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