Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Joyce Theater, New York

Send in the clowns: ‘Antic Meet’

The first of this irreplaceable company’s New York appearances in a final, globe-trotting year moves backwards in time.

The Joyce programme (until Sunday) ends with 1958’s Antic Meet, in which Cunningham reconfigures his beginnings in vaudeville – before he encountered modern dance or even graduated from high school – through the prism of absurdist theatre.

Long-time collaborator Robert Rauschenberg dreamt up the inspired Dada props and costumes for skits loosely based on hoofers, musclemen, tumblers and clowns. Cunningham himself came up with the most famous prop: a café chair strapped to his back that he uses to support a dotty ballerina. She makes a dramatic entrance through a door she has provided for herself.

Antic Meet operates by the laws of the clown universe: if you put one foot in front of the other, you will trip; simple acts grow impossibly tangled; the harder you try, the less there is to show for it; nothing follows from anything. Though the opening-night cast lacked sufficient antic energy, the performance still managed to suggest a new back story for the sudden shifts in tempo, direction and everything that distinguishes a Cunningham dance.

Fast-forward to 1982, when arthritis riddles the choreographer’s hips and feet. Quartet is a quintet, with him as the nearly stationary fifth wheel. Current director Robert Swinston gives an eerie, creepy impersonation of his shuffling gait and achingly alert head and neck. A charged distance separates Swinston from the others – especially Melissa Toogood, who finishes her many expansive off-kilter balances with an extra stretch of the extended leg, and executes her chains of tilted turns at breakneck pace. Quartet, to David Tudor’s bleak oceanic score, is the most desolate Cunningham dance I have seen.

By 1993, where the evening begins, Cunningham is out of the picture. As its technogeek title suggests, CRWDSPCR is one of the first works the choreographer devised with the help of a computer. Instead of the constant unobtrusive entrances and exits for which he is known, all 13 dancers begin onstage and, like chess pieces on a through-the-looking-glass board, take turns moving – individually or in a quadrant. You sense Cunningham, Mad Hatter chess master, behind every move.

Joyce Theater