Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham died today. I spent every other week last summer in the Merce Cunningham studios. Eventually, I stopped. There was no reason, I just decided I didn't want to be a dancer, and I stopped. I wanted to spend the last week with my boyfriend, I wanted to go for shows, read books--anything but dance. It reminds me of the way I stopped doing ballet when I was 12. I had been doing ballet since I was 4, and I had become quite good--I wasn't brilliant and Jean Chan at SCGS didn't like me--but I was good enough to play the walkabouts in the SDT productions, throwing styrofoam snowballs around in Anna Karenina when I was 12 (I walked around with the dancer Paul Ocampo, and I liked the way he held me on stage as my "father," and that was the first time, being touched by a man not my father), loving the way the light blinded everything when I was a cricket/night spirit/clock/the forces of time in Cinderella, braving the dry ice as a swan, ballet master politics. (I have a remarkable memory of a balletmaster screaming at me to get out of the studio cos I threw someone a sly, ironic grin, as he ticked another person off. I quite bewildered and terrified, but I had a lot of 8-year-old pride. I did get out of the studio, as told. I did, however, refuse to apologize, and I refused to cry. He hated my 8-year-old guts and my 8-year-old pride. But I digress.) When I heard news of Merce dying today, my first thought (I was pitching a book for my boss at work) was, wow, what a great publishing opportunity for the New York world. Now that I'm alone and have had some retrospection, I feel really guilty that that was my first thought. Last summer, a large part of summer was Meredith. Meredith is a crazy person. She would come to Cunningham classes everyday (I know this because one week, I actually came everyday). She was learning her 7th or 8th language in between classes while writing her MFA novel. That was when I was trying to figure out my bond issues, and dancing was a good way to escape into my body, and forget. (I have this amazing memory when the instructor stopped all of us at dance, and we all looked out of the Westbeth artist studio window, upon a full half rainbow.) Justin came back from his family holiday, and I resolved my bond issues, and I stopped seeing Meredith everyday because I stopped coming to the lessons. This summer, I told myself I would go for at least one lesson, but I haven't since. So now Merce is dead, and the Cunningham school is preparing the way for its eventual closure when they have figured out how to preserve his legacy. I wish I could be broken up more--something like how Meredith is broken up, using this death as a moment to ponder what it means to be a dancer and an artist and a writer--but I turned away from dance when I was young, turned away from the opportunity to learn more about the Cunningham school of dance. (I turned away from writing poetry later.) What I have left is some memories of the studio, Louise poking fun at me ("Singapore! Use your muscles better!"), teachers telling me my body has so much potential so I shouldn't come for class late, walking to the 1 station with Meredith so I could head back up to Riverside where I was subletting, a fleeting memory of seeing Merce in a wheelchair. Now I have the sense that, I could have done so much more. I could have been an artist, a dancer, a fuller person. I didn't though, and that is why my heart doesn't break as much now.