(diaryland) February 5, 2001 - 12:33:04

I watched a show about Merce Cunningham. He is a ballet guy.

I saw the start of the show. I was all like, "Oh, man. Not BALLET." But then Merce was suddenly dancing around with a jumper on his head that had five armholes and no hole for the head. Apparently, he'd knitted it himself. I soon found out the he had a love of the absurd, and he had some pretty nifty ballet ideas.

He had this thing where he wrote down different sorts of moves on scraps of paper and then he'd perform all the moves in random order according to which ones he grabbed first. It was a lot like the do-it-yourself poems that Tristan Tzara did back in them Dadaist days, and what William S. Burroughs did a bit later on in them Beat days, except of course this was dance moves rather than words. I was all like, "Man. BALLET IS COOL."

Also, his company did this whole dance where they fell down a lot on purpose and there was a guy in charge of the lights who would just flick them on and off when he felt like it. Apparently, it was pretty scary when suddenly, you found yourself falling down in complete darkness for a bit because you weren't quite sure where the floor was.

There was another cool dance they did while they toured around America. They'd do the exact same dance every time, but the set designer would completely change the set each performance so there'd be stuff standing there where there wasn't the night before and so on. The set designer got pretty stressed about it because he was redesigning the set all the time.

In the early years, Merce's ballet company did about two performances a year because everyone thought they sucked. Everyone thought the dances were completely random. They did look a bit random, and sometimes the music the dances were set to sounded a lot like the sweet dulcet tones of a pneumatic drill.

Then Merce, who is really quite old these days, did a dance for us. He was very cute in his leotard with his tufty hair bouncing off his head. They interviewed his chiropractor, who said that watching Merce dance was a bit of a conflicted experience for her, as while it all looked very nice, she knew she'd have to do a hell of a lot of physiotherapy on him every time he had a wee bit of a dance.

There were lots of other cool things, but I won't talk about them. Just know this: BALLET IS COOL.