It's good to know at this strange moment, when so many crises are happening at once, and institutions as solid as General Motors are going under like Atlantis, when the whole financial system is sparking and shorting out like a computer going down, when new forms of gay oppression are showing their ugly heads ("You lost a democratic election! Ha, ha, ha! You should have campaigned! Get over it!"), it's good to know that gay dance-artists are still flourishing at the top of the heap.
This week comes news that our own out-gay choreographer Joe Goode has won a hugely prestigious grant, and has had Axis Dance Company performing his latest and perhaps most humane work in their shows in Oakland this week. And Saturday night gave a last look at a two-week showing of the works of the gay modernist choreographer Merce Cunningham – widely regarded as the greatest dance-maker living today – which included a piece called Crises that, though it's 40 years old, looked harsh, erotic and as funny as Ethan Green's social life, and urgent as this morning's hard-on.
The strange world we're waking up into has always been Cunningham's material – in fact, his work is radically strange, and he wants it that way. From the outset, he's been a modernist devoted to breaking up cliches, like Gertrude Stein or Marcel Duchamp, or his life-partner, John Cage. He's in tune with the New York School poets and painters, so his "dancers" look more like lunar exploration devices, grasshoppers, giraffes or the cranes on the Oakland waterfront than the usual creatures who wheel, dart and melt in each other's arms on the ballet or ballroom stage. They're not in the usual way amorous stalking-horses for our romantic longings – though they are that, it's stranger by far than usual.
It helps to think of his work as "moving pictures." One of the works we saw Saturday night had a decor that looked like a giant blob from outer space which was just arriving and had started putting down suckers tentatively – they hadn't reached the ground yet, and the dancers seemed not to have noticed their arrival, but to be rather understandably agitated as they went through whatever the usual rituals were on this day on this planet.
So he's never been popular in this country. In France, he's revered like Jerry Lewis, popular as a rock star. The same shows that open to half-empty houses here - and Zellerbach Hall was far from full – sell out completely in Paris, in Aix-la-Chapelle, and in the smallest town with a municipal auditorium.
At 89, Merce and his work are close to a crisis of another kind. Can his work survive his death? Who else would know what he really wants?
And can it be financed? Certainly not a two-week residency like he's just had in Berkeley, which was a gift on the part of Bernard Osher and other major donors to Robert Cole, who's retiring after leading Cal Performances as impresario. No expense was spared: lectures, new-media colloquia, events sprouted all over Berkeley for two weeks, including a delightful "happening" staged by UC New Media professor Ken Goldberg, art professor Gregg Niemeyer, and dance professors Lisa Wymore and Joe Goode (yes, the same Joe Goode).
It's odd, but what gives Cunningham's work its energy is the outsider's viewpoint; perhaps oppression gives gays an advantage in showing the world how strange it really is. This is no argument for a return to the closet – but still, there it is.