Oberlin College News & Features

Against the Grain

By Betty Gabrielli

SIDEBAR

To launch Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance, Copeland addressed an audience of artists, critics, and theorists at New York City's Lincoln Center. He has just returned from a book tour that took him throughout the United States and to London and Paris. He lectured in both Barcelona and Porto during l999 in conjunction with a traveling museum exhibition devoted to the work of Merce Cunningham.

Copeland also is co-editor of the widely used anthology What Is Dance?, a consultant for the PBS Dance in America series and the eight-part television series Dancing, and a recipient of the Stagebill Award and the John Gassner Prize for theater criticism. He has published more than 150 articles about dance, theater, and film in the New York Times, the New Republic, the Village Voice, Dance Theatre Journal, Partisan Review, American Theatre, and many other magazines.

Book Cover: Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance

May 24, 2004–"Oberlin students are fairly hip," says Roger Copeland. He should know. Next year marks his 30th as a member of Oberlin's theater and dance faculty.

"What appealed to me about teaching here was that I wouldn't have to pigeonhole myself as just a 20th-century theater person, or 20th-century dance person," Copeland said recently. "I love the range of courses that I get to teach."

So do his students. Some of the hippest find their way to his Concepts of the Avant-Garde. His course Happenings, Non-Literary Theater, and Performance Art and his seminar in literary criticism are magnets for students open to what is cutting edge in art, music, drama, and dance.

"Some of the students most excited about the avant-garde are those who didn't grow up in major art centers like Manhattan. Those students are here, in part, because they want to escape the provincialism they grew up with," Copeland says.

What excites him as a teacher is the championing of connoisseurship, i.e., "placing the arts in the broadest possible context" and, to quote 19th-century poet and literary critic Mathew Arnold, "evaluating them according to the best that has been known and thought in the world."

Infusing Copeland's work in the classroom is his experience as one of the country's foremost dance critics, but also his lifelong study of the great choreographer and 84-year-old seminal artist Merce Cunningham.

"It would be pretty hard to teach 20th-century dance history without teaching Cunningham," Copeland avows. "Not only is he the greatest living choreographer, but he is also the center of one of the great sea changes in the arts of the last 50 years—the movement away from a very hot, deeply personal, expressive aesthetic toward a much cooler one that is less dependent on inner torment and much more dependent on observation of the actual world."

Copeland chronicled that sea change in his just-released Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance, a critical overview of the artist's 60-year career. The book is also an exhilarating history of theater, dance, art, music, and intellectual movements in America (see sidebar).

What Cunningham's art "does quite magnificently—is to help freshen and clarify perception" and "challenge existing relations between seeing and hearing," Copeland writes. "By stretching the interval between stimulus and response, they help to inoculate us against the many forms of (virtually) Pavlovian conditioning that play increasingly dominant roles in our daily lives."

Like Cunningham, Copeland courts change, takes risks, and sees value in the outrageous. One of his greatest satisfactions, he says, "is offering students a genuine alternative to some of the extremes of political correctness. To the extent that one can teach genuinely against the grain and get away with it, it's very gratifying."

Proof that his teaching against the grain has had impact can be seen in the careers of such former students as Eric Bogosian '76 and Julie Atlas Muz '95, two performers who definitely work outside the box.

Bogosian played the title role in the production of Buchner's Woyzeck that Copeland directed in the spring of l976. A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bogosian is a film actor (Wonderland), a playwright (Talk Radio, SubUrbia), and an acerbic monologist (Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll). Of his 2003 solo recording The Worst of Bogosian, the Hartford Courant reviewer wrote, "the humor, and the anger, work on several levels. For example, his final rant attacks the annoying and the exasperating in life with loud curses and blunt language. It is shocking, he is furious—and you will be choking with laughter."

Atlas Muz, a recent theater and dance major, is now a very hot, New York-based choreographer much in demand for her over-the-top conceptual burlesque performances. For example, a come-hither dance done with a bloody stump attached to her wrist and kept tucked behind her back "gave the appearance of a disembodied hand," said the New York Times. "The appendage tried not only to choke her but also to ravage her body. It was pure Ms. Muz: bawdy, satirical, and unadulterated theater from beginning to end."

Many of Copeland's students also go on to acclaimed careers in literary criticism and publishing, but he refuses to take credit for any of them: "I don't think they've been inspired by me. A significant percentage wanted to be artists to begin with."