Milli Vanilli in Brighton

One of the most uncomfortable hours I’ve ever spent occurred in Brighton, Michigan, in the late 1980's.

I was taking ballet classes there. Most of the students were local high school students. The assistant instructor, a dance major at the University of Michigan, wanted us to wear costumes to class on Halloween. When I didn’t, I was derided and so wore my sweats for class.

I was startled when two girls showed up dressed like hoboes in black face.

I learned from those admiring their costumes that they were supposed to be Milli Vanilli, two European-born break dancers who had some hit songs at the time. A few months later, in January 1990, they were criticized for not actually singing on their records, but simply acting as a stage presence for others.

I was shocked. No one seemed to think black face was the least bit offensive.

I looked for an exit. I didn’t want to confront them. After all, they had probably picked these costumes because they admired the way the men moved. Dancers can be particularly myopic when movement is involved.

But, I wondered, what were their mothers thinking who must have helped them apply the make-up. It wasn’t simple dark make-up, like a white would use on stage to play a Black. It was minstrel show black face.

I wondered, did they wear these costumes to school, or simply spend that much time on make-up for a dance class? If they were in school, where was the teacher or administrator who should have taken them aside, explained the realities of modern social life, and asked them to wash their faces.

What about the college student leading the class? She was so interested in celebrating Halloween, she abandoned the standard center floor work for conga lines and other forms of free expression.
I knew about the area support for the Ku Klux Klan; the local dragon, Robert Miles, was still alive. I’d seen survivalists out on weekend exercises when I drove down some county roads. Weren’t any of the adults they met at all aware of what they were seeing?

I got increasingly angry, both from by my sense of helplessness in the face of innocent bigotry and at the way the teacher was conducting the class. More and more, I wanted to walk out in protest, but was restrained by my inbred manners.

However, I soon stopped taking classes in Brighton.

Merce Cunningham

When Merce Cunningham died a week ago Sunday I kept looking back at a photograph of his foot from the 1958 production of "Antic Meet." He was dressed in black, against a black background, so all that showed was his face, hands, and left foot pointed straight down in a leap with a chair strapped to his back.

That foot captured the essence of dance. The straightness of the line resulted from the raw talent and anatomy of the dancer, the pointing that looked so natural was the product of years of practice, the lighting came from a production designed to showcase dance, and the lens captured what the audience saw.

The obituaries and eulogies carried the usual biographical information and praised his choreography for blendeding modern dance with traditional ballet to capture the randomness of life. The New York Times quoted a fellow teacher, Richard Glasstone, who believed that he, along with Fred Astaire and Margot Fonteyn, had been the greatest dancers of the twentieth century.

Among the personal reminiscences was one that revealed how, even in the most ephemeral of art forms, the materialism of the Reagan years has seeped into people's evaluations of greatness. Alma Guillermoprieto remembers visiting him a few years before and noticing the shabby furniture. I'm sure Cunningham didn't care about furniture after his best friend, John Cage, died in 1992.

She also noted that the man she believed was the "greatest living creator of dance beauty and contemporary fusions of art forms...did not even own his own home." The lack of real estate didn't signify to Cunningham. Diminishment came from arthritis that robbed him of his ability to move. He was like Monet with his cataracts and Beethoven without his hearing, an artist bereft of his medium.

He himself said dance left nothing - no copyrights like those of Cage for companies to haggle over, no paintings like those of his collaborator, Robert Rauschenberg, for auction galleries to hype - "nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

Every dancer knows the song from Chorus Line, "What I did for Love," has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a single foot eternally suspended in the air, defying arthritis and death.

Notes:
Guillermoprieto, Alma. "Merce Cunningham," New Yorker website, 28 July 2009.

Macaulay, Alastair. "Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies," The New York Times website, 27 July 2009, includes quote by Cunningham and the photograph from "Antic Meet."