{"id":2127,"date":"2009-07-27T16:00:04","date_gmt":"2009-07-27T20:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.berkshirelinks.com\/berkshires-news\/?p=2127"},"modified":"2009-07-27T16:00:04","modified_gmt":"2009-07-27T20:00:04","slug":"merce-cunninghams-gift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/merce-cunninghams-gift\/","title":{"rendered":"Merce Cunningham’s gift"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Merce Cunningham’s gift<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n

We are re-posting material relating to Merce Cunningham upon the occassion of his death, July 26, 2009: this reminiscence and review of Merce Cunningham Dance Company came to MASS MoCA<\/a> that originally were published on NewBerkshire.com in 2000. <\/p>\n

The Greenwich Village artists’ scene of the 1940s, as recalled by Frances Benn Hall<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I graduated from the University of Wisconsin<\/strong> in 1941, I was so eager to dash off to seek fame and fortune in the arts world of Greenwich Village<\/strong> that I boarded the first train for Manhattan<\/strong> and told the college to mail me my diploma.<\/p>\n

Getting a job, any job, proved difficult. I finally found a lowly clerical one in the garment district. It paid $17 a week – all my MA in theatre was worth at that time, and the job only obtained when I said I could give Sinclair Lewis<\/strong> as a local reference.<\/p>\n

(During the previous Fall at college, I had been one of a group of fifteen to whom he taught creative writing. Only one member of our class seems to have achieved literary fame in later life; Howard Moss<\/strong> was for years poetry editor of The New Yorker<\/u>.)<\/p>\n

\"MerceIn those lean years, The Village still thronged with starving artists. Finding housing was easy. I quickly moved into the front room of a basement apartment on West 13th Street where my rent was $6.00 a week. I shared the kitchen and bath with two dancers from Martha Graham’s<\/strong> group. One had a tiny maid’s room in the back, and the other, Merce Cunningham<\/strong>, slept on a cot in the communal kitchen. Their weekly rent was even lower than mine.<\/p>\n

Merce was already honored in the dance world and that Spring was performing the solo “Dear March Come In”; in Graham’s Letter to the World,<\/i> but was not yet world famous as he would become, and thus as needy as the rest of us. He worked at his dancing like a demon, but he did find time to join, with me, a Village theatre group called The Bendukov Theatre Studio<\/strong>, to which we went evenings to work on, but never have money to produce, exotic plays such as Cummings’ him<\/i> and Byron’s Cain<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Food was a big problem, and what little our pooled pittances could afford was stored in a small wooden ice-box in the kitchen to which the ice-man automatically came. However, it got to the point where his bill had mounted alarmingly, and because we could not pay it, we avoided meeting him. This had a negative side in that he kept delivering ice even when there was no food in the box.<\/p>\n

I can remember standing in the kitchen beside Merce as he emptied the water from the drip pan into the sink and sadly remarked, “There goes another quarter.” In that long-ago Manhattan where a nickel was all one needed for the subway or for a boat ride across the harbor from the Battery to Staten Island, a quarter was not treated lightly.<\/p>\n

Since I had a “real” job, I had more ready cash, meager though it was, than Merce usually had. However, once, rather hurriedly, he thrust a dollar bill at me and said, “Buy yourself something frivolous,” before he loped off to rehearsal in Martha’s studio over in a loft just north of Washington Square.<\/p>\n

I took my dollar, boarded the 7th Avenue subway at the corner of West 12th, got off at Macys<\/strong> where in the basement bookstore I bought my first copy of James Joyce’s<\/strong> Ulysses<\/i>. It now sits proudly among the three long shelves of Joyce books on my living room wall among several other copies of Ulysses<\/i> I have since acquired. But it remains my favorite one because on the fly leaf I wrote the date and the words, “Something frivolous from Merce.”<\/p>\n

Had I become the great writer Lewis had encouraged me to try to be, I would know that the above paragraph is my conclusion. However, I must add a coda to round out the picture.<\/p>\n

My large front room also, when I was not sleeping in it, served us as a communal living room, and we sometimes held parties there. One night there was such a party at which I was not present. When I returned around midnight, the party had wound down, and the stragglers left so I could go to bed.<\/p>\n

They had been having a bit wilder time than usual, and although none of my personal belongings were ever disturbed, that evening a young artist in his glee had painted a mural on my ceiling. It was not unattractive. I remember thinking it really quite good. It was a great angel with outstretched wings that covered most of the ceiling. I felt I could sleep with that angel hovering over me and went to bed.<\/p>\n

However, my alarm woke me to a startling and embarrassing discovery. Lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling changed my perspective. That so innocent-seeming angel had been so painted that a foot-long pipe, relic of some long-ago light fixture, had become a giant phallus.<\/p>\n

Life among the artists had become too much for me. After work that day, I found a room on West 12th Street with a nosy and prudish landlady, very fussy about keys and using the pay phone in the hall after 8 PM, but willing to rent me a room with which I could cope.<\/p>\n

It was only recently, discussing those days with a Graham dancer who was present at that long-ago party, that I was reminded of a fact that I had forgotten: The young artist was named Robert Motherwell<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

2014 Jacob’s Pillow schedule, Contact info. and links<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reminiscence by our theatre writer, Frances Benn Hall, of sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village in 1940 with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who died July 26, 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13317,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacobs-pillow","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}