Reviews/Dance; Merce Cunningham's Way With a Mood
By JENNIFER DUNNING
Published: March 26, 1990
The world of Merce Cunningham's ''Shards,'' performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on Friday at the City Center, seems timeless and immutable until the surprise of its final moments. The eight dancers, clad in simple, dull green and black leotards and tights, might almost be fish hovering in still waters made dim by William Anastasi's lighting and his earth-colored, scrawled backdrop. David Tudor's contemplative electronic score brings an extra sense of privacy to this hushed and quiet world.
There are fleeting motifs, like one dancer's tiny, understated falls against her partner. One notices a cradling hold here, an arched lift there. Bodies come together in rounded sculptural configurations from time to time. Three men form a tilting, motionless line, each looking profoundly different in the same pose. But in the end what one sees most clearly is the whole stage picture, which is as important here as it is in so many other Cunningham dances.
Less typically, the dancers travel very little, and mostly in occasional, skirting channels around each other and through a stage space dotted with standing, down-curving, kneeling and reclining bodies. Eventually, to building sound and brightening light, a dancer weaving through sends others into motion and suddenly they are washing off the stage in a wonderfully gradual but sweeping eddy of soft runs. One dancer is left behind, dipping and looping in a small space, still in a separate world, but on an empty stage now.
The subtlety of that last group exit is very exciting. But ''Shards'' is otherwise a profoundly peaceful dance. And it was performed with a remarkable balance of inwardness and piquant clarity by Helen Barrow, Victoria Finlayson, Alan Good, Patricia Lent, David Kulick, Larissa McGoldrick, Carol Teitelbaum and Robert Wood. The program was completed by Mr. Cunningham's ''Fabrications'' and the elegantly playful ''August Pace.''