Which raises the question:
What constitutes the costume
design? Would a maker still
be faithful to the design if
she were to follow the pattern
using a different fabric? What
about the way those designs
look to a contemporary eye?
“No one wears a unitard
anymore, except in Merce
Cunningham reproductions,”
Lent says. What was originally
a contemporary, cutting-
edge style now looks out-
dated. “You don’t want it
to look old-fashioned if that
wasn’t the original intent,”
she says. Reproducing the
costumes exactly, for today’s
stagings of these performance
works, has “a way of saying‘This is not from now; this is
from then.’ ”
In the absence of the original
performance, are these endur-
ing remnants part of a fixed
archive or are they fodder
for a still-living legacy? Lent
responds: “If Merce were alive
right now, he wouldn’t be
bringing original dancers back
for remounted works. He’d be
using the new dancer he just
brought into the studio a year
ago. Merce was inspired by
change. He wasn’t nostalgic.
He wasn’t interested in recon-
structions. He was interested
in new work.”
That’s the conundrum.
“No dance can be Merce’s latest
dance ever again. But at the
time they were made, each of
these works was Merce’s latest
dance. Our role in restaging
them now, beyond getting
the details right, is making sure
the dancers really own that
work. They can’t just be faith-
ful imitations; all the artists
involved have to truly inhabit
the work. The nature of the
dance requires that kind of
in-the-moment magic.”
Curator Pys ́echoes Lent’s
concern: “How can you pre-
serve that liveness?” He
describes a recent acquisition
the Walker made, a whole range
of materials – choreography,
costumes, set pieces, lighting,
and stage instructions – related
to a piece by New York perfor-
mance artist and choreographer
Maria Hassabi. Their agree-
ment with the artist specifies
that she or her designatedPhoto^ creditrepresentative(s) must be
brought in for any Walker
restaging of her work to tweak
the presentation before it’s
shown in public. Should she
no longer be alive, with no
designated proxies available,
the museum’s acquisition of
her performance work, and all
its constituent elements, will
cease to be publicly shown.
“It’s a reminder that every-
thing expires,” Pys ́ says –
dances, people, memory. Cos-
tumes fray and fall apart; even
the most enduring artworks
degrade over time. What mat-
ters, in the end, he says, is the
integrity of the work, adhering
to the vision and wishes of the
artists who made it.mercecunningham.org
Susannah Schouweiler is an editorand writer in Minnesota. (^) Ph
ot
o^ (
lef
t):
C
oll
ec
tio
n^ o
f^ W
alk
er
A
rt^
Ce
nt
er
,^ fu
ll^ c
re
dit
s^ l
ist
ed
on
pa
ge
57
/^
Ph
ot
os
(r
igh
t):
©
M
erc
e^ C
un
nin
gh
am
T
ru
st,
fu
ll^ c
red
its
lis
ted
on
pa
ge
57
56 american craft aug/sept 19