Merce Cunningham's 'Ocean'
DANCE REVIEW
Setting it down in a rock quarry is hardly practical. But the site proves breathtaking, and a wonderful adventure ensues.
WAITE PARK, MINN. — THE RAINBOW QUARRY -- with its mammoth, magnificent 150-foot rock walls -- lies 70 miles northwest of Minneapolis. To get to it, you pass by Granite City Counseling, and some might say that Merce Cunningham needed just that for undertaking perhaps the most impractical and magnificent production of his career in his 90th year. Thursday night, his Merce Cunningham Dance Company made an "Ocean" in the quarry.
It had help, of course, and lots of it, to put on this breathtaking 90-minute 1994 work, which was danced in the round and accompanied by an orchestra of 150 musicians surrounding the audience on the top row of circular bleachers, in a breathtaking site where giant machines normally wrest away giant slabs of rock.
Access roads were built by Martin Marietta Materials, which owns the quarry and which surprised everyone by its enthusiastic support for the project (the dress rehearsal Wednesday night was given for muscular stonecutters and their families). The St. Cloud Symphony, from the neighboring town, was bolstered by musicians from four colleges in the area. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which sponsored the event as the opening of its performing arts season, needed a convoy of buses to ferry an audience of 1,200 in and out. The College of St. Benedict and the University of Minnesota also had a hand in the making of the event, which had a budget of about $1 million.
The shiny, skintight costumes had been accidentally shipped to London, and dressmakers in New York had to work around the clock to sew new ones and ship them to Minnesota. Then, on a wet day, the rain gods needed enticing to keep the site dry for the performance. Cunningham said that the morning of the performance he watched what looked like a waterfall from the window of his hotel room.
But, apart from some drizzle, the weather held. And the spectacle of extraordinary dancers in silky sea-green, bright orange and deep purple body suits evoking exotic sea creatures and surrounded by jagged, jutting, primordial mountains of granite -- all the while enveloped in foaming waves of sound -- made everything worth it.
Originally staged in a charming 19th century circus building in Brussels, and since then occasionally mounted in tents, amphitheaters and other circular venues, "Ocean" is Cunningham's glorious tribute to his longtime collaborator, John Cage, who died in 1992. Cage had greatly admired James Joyce and got the idea for "Ocean" from the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who once told him that Joyce had planned to write about the sea as a follow-up to "Finnegans Wake."
