Mercy Merce

Imagine a dance performance in the round. From your seat, you enjoy a unique view of a kaleidoscope of graceful forms, their patterns shifting and shimmering, elusive as those of a city street, a human life, or an ocean in motion. The ringed spectators are themselves ringed by a huge orchestra, 150-strong, playing a complex score that reaches no two people exactly the same way. Beyond the musicians rise the rugged granite walls of a quarry; above you, nothing but stars.

This is Merce Cunningham’s Ocean as it will be performed this fall at the Rainbow Quarry near St. Cloud, and it’s easily the biggest event of the fall dance season. Presented by the Walker Arts Center, Northrop Auditorium, and the College of St. Benedict, Ocean is epic. “This project is huge,” says Philip Bither, performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center. “Sometimes superlatives are tossed around, but the word monumental is appropriate here.”

Merce Cunningham, often called the greatest living American choreographer, got his start as a dancer for Martha Graham. During his seventy-year career, he’s worked with many great artists, including John Cage, his longtime partner. Last year the Merce Cunningham Dance Company celebrated its fiftieth anniversary; this year Cunningham celebrates his ninetieth birthday.

The Walker, which has been supporting Cunningham since 1963, has been an important part of his history. Says Bither, “If I had to point to one figure we’ve had the most significant relationship with, it’s Merce Cunningham.”

Cunningham creates dances without plots or characters, treating dance not as an interpretive medium but as a pure art. Adapting Cage’s musical ideas, Cunningham uses chance in the composition process to reach beyond his own imagination. “Usually,” Bither says, chance can lead to “something else we wouldn’t have thought of.”

Cunningham’s most ambitious work, Ocean began as a joint project between Cunningham and Cage, but Cage didn’t live to complete the work; instead, Ocean’s two scores, one orchestral and one electronic, were composed by Andrew Culver and David Tudor. Ocean premiered in 1994 and has been seen in a handful of places around the world, most recently in 2005 in New York.

“But this is a very special circumstance,” Cunningham says. Outdoors, encircled by stone, this Ocean will blend art and nature in a spectacle that’s drawing viewers from all over the United States, even the world. The idea for the setting arose after his dancers toured the quarries in their last visit to Minnesota, and Cunningham loved it at once: “Oh, I was delighted. I thought, “What a marvelous idea.’ ”

Ocean will require a little extra of viewers, but the presenting partners are making this as easy as possible, with bus rides and even box dinners. And, as Bither points out, “works that really ask something of audiences are [what] people carry with them for the rest of their lives.” Sept. 11–13. Rainbow Quarry, Waite Park, near St. Cloud, 612-375-7600