Merce Cunningham showing a Martha Graham fall exercise: photographs by Barbara Morgan

1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You open a book new to you but published in the last century and your mind explodes. I reproduce here four 1942 photographs by Barbara Morgan of the young Merce Cunningham demonstrating Martha Graham technique. I’ve been researching Cunningham since the last century, but I’d never seen or known of these photos until this afternoon. 1942 was, I suspect, when Cunningham began to devise his own dance technique. A few weeks before the 2020 lockdown, I was lucky to attend - in the Westbeth studio of all places - a joint lecture-demonstration about the connections between the Graham and Cunningham techniques, a subject on which I’d already thought and written. But these photos make me want to begin again, in a happy way.

In the early 1980s, I was commissioned to write ten or more entries for the International Encyclopaedia of Dance. I, like most writers, was late with my submissions, but I believe I completed them all by 1987. By the time the encyclopaedia was published by Oxford University Press in 1998, however, another eleven years had passed; I was a full-time London theatre critic, and too preoccupied by my new duties to invest in a copy of the encyclopaedia. In 2011, however, Janice Ross and Mindy Aloff conspired to give me a copy (six dense and rich volumes). Ten years on, however, I’ve yet to read most of my own entries, let alone those by others. Today, however, I opened volume 4 - I’ve already forgotten what I was looking for - and was thunderstruck to find these photographs, which illustrate Deborah Jowitt’s excellent entry on Modern Dance Technique.

Cunningham, always a great and singular dancer, was already recognised as different within the Martha Graham company, which he had joined at age twenty in September 1939. His posture, elevation, stretched limbs, and elegant persona seemed immediately closer to ballet than most modern dancers. Graham, whose idiom was chiefly conceived for women at that stage, acknowledged she was not the right teacher for him: around 1940, she sent him to the School of American Ballet, where he took class in particular with Anatole Oboukhoff. Around 1942, working alone in his studio at East 17th St, he began to devise what became the Merce Cunningham dance technique, combining and rejecting various ingredients from the Graham idiom and from ballet, while developing some in innovative ways. He gradually (over the next thirty years) became known as an inspiring teacher; his technique became - and remains - one of the greatest academic dance disciplines.

Yet here he is, in the very year when his mind began to turn to secession and independence, demonstrating - exemplifying - his mother-choreographer’s technique. His main Graham teacher, during his years with the Graham company, was Marjorie Mazia, whose stage career was less distinguished than his (she was one of the four Acolytes in “Appalachian Spring”, he the Revivalist preacher), but who taught superbly (and soon became the girlfriend and second wife of Woody Guthrie, who, as one of the musicians on the peripheries of the Graham company, soon became an admirer of the highly unalike John Cage).

What does this series tell us? Barbara Morgan, a superb photographer, had already begun taking many views of Graham and her choreography. My own assumption is that Graham was too strong a figure in 1942 to permit people to photograph her technique without her approval; I think imagine that she was behind this series. If so, it’s fascinating that in 1942 Graham selected any man to demonstrate the spiralling fall of her dance technique; it’s amazing that she chose Cunningham. The marvellous lucidity of Cunningham’s style nonetheless show us why, if Graham did. As yet, however, I’ve found no evidence that Morgan photographed any other dancers showing Graham technique, or that Graham at this stage wanted any record of his technique. It may be that these photographs were an independent venture on the parts of Morgan and Cunningham, conducted in the very year when Cunningham began to present his own first professional choreography and when he probably began to devise his own technique. Morgan had been photographing Graham since 1935; in Cunningham, whom she subsequently photographed in his own early solos, she found her next great subject.

Thursday 5 August

1-4: Merce Cunningham demonstrating a Martha Graham fall exercise in 1942: photographs by Barbara Morgan.

2.

3.

4.

5. A page in the 1998 International Encyclopedia of Dance, edited by Selma-Jeanne Cohen (Oxford University Press). The entry on Modern Dance Technique is by Deborah Jowitt.