Having a Ball in Brooklyn

The choreography of Merce Cunningham is to dancing what nonobjectivity is to painting or atonality to music. His work is total abstraction, es chewing the cliches and conventions of gesture, costume and music by which both ballet and modern dance seek to evoke moods, emotions and dramatic climaxes. Whatever emotions Cunningham's audiences feel are entirely in dividual. The same movement or interplay of bodies might engender fear in one person and laughter in another--and that is the way it is meant to be.

A onetime soloist with Marsha Graham, Cunningham has earned international acclaim with the small, highly honed company he formed in 1953.

Oddly enough, it was not until last week that he undertook his first New York City season, at Brooklyn's Academy of Music. In Scramble, danced to the electronic whoops and cracklings of Composer Toshi Ichiyanagi's Activities for Orchestra, Cunningham and his eight dancers -- barefoot, as usual, and in bright colors -- stretched, tottered, swung, pivoted, scurried and bounced among strips of colored cloth stretched at different levels on aluminum frames.

Scramble snapped with gaiety and humor, dominated by Cunningham him self, who looked like a king-sized elf swiveting in a high wind -- and by the taut, controlled eroticism of his beautiful leading dancer, Carolyn Brown.

Rain Forest, composed this year, was performed in white, tight-fitting rags and tatters on a dead-black stage dec orated by Pop Artist Andy Warhol with 25 large pillows made of aluminum foil. Inflated with helium, they floated about among the dancers (and occasionally into the audience) while electronic music by David Tudor wailed and chattered.

The "accompaniment" for How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (TIME, March 15), by Cunningham's friend Composer John Cage, had nothing to do with music. At a small table downstage left sat Cage and Actor David Vaughan in dinner jackets, sipping champagne while they read humorous snippets and anecdotes from Cage's writings ("When Gandhi was asked what he thought about Western civilization, he said, 'It would be nice' "). The text had no clear connection with the skittery maneuvers that Cunningham & Co. were carrying out onstage, and none of it had any bearing on how to pass, kick, fall or run with anything. But everyone seemed to be having a ball.

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