Noland. Dance Reaserch

The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression
Carrie Noland
Dance Research Journal, Volume 42, Number 1, Summer 2010, pp. 46-60 (Article)
Published by University of Illinois Press DOI: 10.1353/drj.0.0063

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/drj/summary/v042/42.1.noland.html Access Provided by University of Manchester at 07/08/10 10:18PM GMT

Photo 1. Merce Cunningham in his Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1952). Photographer: Gerda Peterich.

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The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression
Carrie Noland here is expression in Cunningham’s choreography? Are the moving bodies on stage expressive? If so, what are they expressing and how does such expression occur? Several of the finest theorists of dance—among them, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, and Dee Reynolds—have already approached the question of expressivity in the work of Merce Cunningham. Acknowledging the formalism and astringency of his choreography, they nonetheless insist that expression does indeed take place. Foster locates expression in the “affective significance” as opposed to the “emotional experience” of movement (1986, 38); Franko finds it in an “energy source . . . more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” (1995, 80); and Reynolds identifies expression in the dancing subject’s sensorimotor “faculties” as they are deployed “fully in the present” (2007, 169). 1 Cunningham himself has defined expression in dance as an intrinsic and inevitable quality of movement, indicating that his search to capture, isolate, and frame this quality is central to his choreographic process.2 As a critical theorist (rather than a dance historian), I am interested in expression as a more general, or cross-media, category and therefore find the efforts by Cunningham and his critics

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