Merce Cunningham goddess Carolyn Brown enters modern-dance eternity

Dance
Carolyn Brown and Merce Cunningham in Suite for Five. Photograph by Marvin Silver, 1968, courtesy Cunningham Trust

It’s all in the photo. An unusual pose, but Merce Cunningham rolled that way … unusual. With the early female Cunningham dancers — Viola Farber and Sandra Neels come to mind, each an iconoclastic dancer — Carolyn Brown formed a threesome. But let’s face it, Carolyn Brown (1927-2025), who passed away recently, was the High Priestess of Cunningham Cool. In this photo, she demonstrates the purity of purpose, the unembellished physical truth, that seemed so very intentional in moments like this choreographic capture from Cunningham’s Suite for Five.

There she dangles in space, supported solely by her somewhat pigeon-toed partner. Her full body is engaged muscularly. Starting at bottom, with her beautifully pointed feet, running up her long legs, all the more imperious clad in white tights, through her lengthy ballerina backbone, she uses personal agency to forge that elegant high arch. I note Carolyn Brown’s eyes in this moment are wide open. Her back-bend is not a moment of rapture, or “release.” No. She is executing the specific instructions of an exigent choreographer and by dint of her training, the upside-down “J” curve she forms with her body creates a pleasing design. It is not intentionally pleasing but it is, in fact, pleasing — just as an element of nature could be pleasing. From her breastbone along her upper thorax to her resolute chin, you could balance a cup of tea. And the arms that hang just so, and the little break at her wrist that shows she is fully dancing, no matter whether she is upside down or inside out, she is dancing with full control of her arms right through to her naturalistic hands.

This intimate moment between two dancers contains not a whit of sentimentality or romance. Nor eroticism. But neither is it cold. It “is what it is.” It’s human, with no overlay of emotion. Two bodies, a man and a woman, in time and space, fulfilling a task. Motion got them there, and motion would retrieve them. I feel so very grateful having seen these two artists perform, Brown, with her obvious grounding in classical ballet making her an enigma within the Cunningham cult. She lived a long life and in it, she danced miles.

Carolyn Brown in Walkaround Time. Photograph by James Klosty, 1970.

Dance critic Debra Levine is founder/editor/publisher of arts●meme.

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