Artist Daniel Arsham. (Patrick McMullan Company)

Artist Daniel Arsham has been commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) to design sets for its final performances, which will take place at New York's Park Avenue Armory from December 29 through 31. Following those shows, the group will disband, in accordance with the late choreographer's wishes.

Mr. Arsham is creating the installations by enlarging digital photographs of clouds, some which he took while traveling on airplanes with the company in conjunction with previous projects. The artist began working with the company in 2007, when he created installations for its eyeSpace piece.

Designing sets for the MCDC, Mr. Arsham follows in the footsteps of artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and William Anastasi, who have all previously worked with the group. The artist shows with Galerie Perrotin in Paris.

“This new collaboration with Daniel continues the company’s long
tradition of bringing together unique creative voices," MCDC executive director Trevor Carlson said in a statement. (Mr. Carlson may be familiar to some readers from his appearance in Tacita Dean's 2008 film portrait of Mr. Cunningham.)

Mr. Arsham's work often takes the form of architectural installations or sculptures that are transmogrifying into strange new forms. "In Daniel Arsham's world, nothing is what it seems," Pilar Viladas wrote in the The New York Times, in 2010. "A smooth wall suddenly looks as if it is being stretched like fabric. A solid white cube gives the impression that it's been eaten away. An Arcadian landscape populated only by a kangaroo is invaded by a rectangular slab that hovers in midair."

Mr. Cunningham, who died in 2009, stipulated that tickets for his company's final performances cost only $10. They go on sale Aug. 15.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Patrick McMullan Co.

Following a series of six performances at the Park Avenue Armory that will run Dec. 29-31, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is set to shut down, in accordance with the wishes of its eponymous founder. Today, the New York Times reports that Aug. 15 has been set as the sale date for the tickets to those final shows.

The tickets, which will be available through the Park Avenue Armory’s website, armoryonpark.org, will sell for $10, per Mr. Cunningham’s stipulations.

Competition is likely to be fierce for those final shows, but New Yorkers  can also catch the M.C.D.C. at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in early December, when it will present six works, including RainForest (1968), which features Andy Warhol’s 1966 Silver Clouds sculptures.

In 2009, Mr. Cunningham announced that he would require his company to shut down two years following his death. He died less than two months later. The M.C.D.C. embarked on a two-year world tour in February, 2010.

To begin with: You're going to be spending a lot of time at the Joyce.

First up, Larry Keigwin, from the 8th through the 13th, with a full-evening work called Dark Habits. Keigwin is always smart, witty, New Yorky. Not everyone likes him as much as I do, but here's your chance to judge for yourself. (He's also a charming dancer.)

Next, from the 15th through the 20th: One of my favorite choreographers, Doug Varone, also with a full-evening work, Chapters From a Broken Novel. Six years ago, I wrote here that his new work, Castles, was the best new dance piece I'd seen in a long time, and nothing that's come along since has changed my mind. What's so special? His unusual gift for combining kinetic excitement with humanity and highly charged emotion. I guess you could call it expressive excitement.

And then, from the 22nd though the 27th, the return of the Merce Cunningham Company, deep into its Legacy Tour--everything's moving inexorably to its self-imposed dissolution at the end of the year. This is absolutely required seeing for admirers of the late, great Merce; soon his work will be solely in the hands (feet?) of other companies.

And let's not forget the Foundress: The Martha Graham company is going to be at the Rose from March 15 to March 20. The novelties will be a revival of the Robert Wilson Snow on the Mesa (1995) and a new piece by Bulareyaung Pagarlava, but the most emotional program for many of us will be the one on the 17th celebrating Martha's collaboration with Isamu Noguchi: Appalachian Spring, Cave of the Heart and Embattled Garden.

Mark Morris? Yes, March 17 to March 27, at the Morris Dance Center, his studio across from BAM, with its intimate theater that can only accommodate under 200 people. He's bringing us a world premiere--Festival Dance, to a Hummel trio--and two New York Premieres: The Muir, to a group of Beethoven's arrangements of Scottish and Irish songs, and Petrichor, to a Villa-Lobos string quartet. Small pieces in a small space, but with big expectations. This, of course, is a must.

Trisha Brown? At the Dance Theater Workshop, on and off from the 15th to the 26th.

Yvonne Rainer? At the Baryshnikov Arts Center from the 16th to the 19th.

After all this, I give you permission to relax for a little while, to gear up for the return of New York City Ballet (May 4) and ABT (May 16).

At NYCB, a new version of the Weill-Brecht The Seven Deadly Sins, choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett and featuring Patti LuPone. (Not, alas, Allegra Kent and Lotte Lenya, who starred in Balanchine's 1958 version.) Also Vienna Waltzes, La Sonnambula and Jewels. To be avoided if possible: Peter Martins' Thou Swell and Susan Stroman's For the Love of Duke.

At ABT: Don't miss the company premiere of Ratmansky's brilliant and hilarious The Bright Stream (a triumph when the Bolshoi brought it here several years ago). Also new works by Ratmansky and Wheeldon (oh yes, and by Benjamin Millepied). Plus an important revival: Tudor's Shadowplay.

As for the full-evening spectacles, it would be hard to say which is the bigger yawn, James Kudelka's Cinderella or John Neumeier's The Lady of the Camelias. Avoid both. But the old standbys will be up and running: Giselle, Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty. Try to see Cojocaru in Don Q, Giselle or Beauty, Osipova in Coppélia or Beauty. And Murphy and/or Hallberg in just about anything--except Cinderella. Don't say I didn't warn you!

                        rgottlieb@observer.com

The Cunningham company, hewing to Cunningham's wishes that the troupe  not become a "museum" to his work (he passed away in 2009), will be disbanded at the end of the year. The first of their final hometown performances is March 22 through March 27 at the Joyce, and the company is looking forward to it in a bittersweet way. Some of the last dancers to be trained by Cunningham himself will perform. "It is especially rewarding to perform for audiences in the city he called home," said Trevor Carlson, executive director of the Cunningham company. 

Within the dance world, the reappearance of the historic work is keenly awaited. Wendy Perron, editor of Dance magazine, has looked forward to seeing Antic Meet for years, she said. The idea that "'anything is possible'--that was the original flavor of the stuff that Merce did."

Indeed, looking back, Cunningham created the first postmodern dance. His performers' bodies were toned to perfection as in ballet, but they moved in a vacuum, without meaning, symbols or overt theme. In Antic Meet and other pieces, they danced around Rauschenberg's "combines" to the non-music of John Cage. The trio's alliance was among the great collaborations of 20th-century art.

Cunningham met Cage in 1938 when the latter was playing piano accompaniment for the dance classes at a Seattle school. Cage was married at the time, but the two men eventually came to live together in New York. Rauschenberg worked with both of them at Black Mountain College (a now legendary mid-century artistic cauldron) in North Carolina in 1953, and he introduced them to Jasper Johns, who was his downstairs neighbor, lover and sometimes collaborator. Johns went on to serve as an artistic advisor of the Cunningham dance troupe. The four lived in New York in the 1950s at a time when the new arts scene was undergoing a revolution. Hanging out at Greenwich Village bars, casting the I Ching and drinking together, they formed a clique of artists and intellectuals that overthrew the status quo.

Antic Meet, when it was created in 1958, was something of an inside joke. With costumes (described as "zany") by Rauschenberg, Antic Meet attempted "to satirize the more foolish mannerisms of the Graham dance theater," wrote New York Times critic Alistair Macaulay. This was what Cunningham represented to dance: the departure from Martha Graham, the departure from narrative, lyricism and gesture. All this was replaced by "chance operations," as Cunningham called them, and collaboration between movement, music, visual art and design,

But few artistic partnerships last forever. There was a falling-out: Rauschenberg's comment that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was "his biggest canvas" reportedly offended Cage, and other clashes over everything from punctuality (the artist was apparently always late) to more weighty matters led to their separation for some years. During those years, Rauschenberg "cheated," designing sets and costumes for Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown. But the men would collaborate again in their later years on such works as Interscape, Travelogue and, lastly, XOVER (crossover), a 2007 work Rauschenberg designed the sets for, a collage of photographs and blood-red arcs and slashes of paint.

In conjunction with the Antic Meet performance, original Rauschenberg costumes and artwork and archival footage from many Cunningham-Rauschenberg collaborations will be exhibited at the Rauschenberg Foundation's new West 19th Street space, opening March 21. The John Cage Trust has provided sound from Mr. Cage's Essay (1987) as well.

"It will almost be a snow globe," Christy MacLear, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, said of the show. "We want to celebrate the range of his work." Many people do not realize that Rauschenberg did his own experimental performances, says Ms. MacLear, including pieces featuring turtles with flashlights strapped to their backs. The exhibit will feature archival film of many of Rauschenberg's "performance-related works," and the original costumes from Antic Meet. "It's not something you can sell in a gallery," said Ms. MacLear.

Rauschenberg, artistic adviser to Cunningham's company from 1954 to 1964, arguably contributed more to dance than any other visual artist (Antic Meet's "parachute dresses" will be included at the exhibit). When Cunningham first began to tour, fresh out of Black Mountain, Rauschenberg stage-managed his performances. The pair collaborated on numerous works, including Minutiae, for which Rauschenberg's first "combine" was created, as well as pieces central to the development of postmodern dance, such as Summerspace and Crises.

Cunningham worked with other visual artists as well, hiring Johns in 1964 and later English artist Mark Lancaster. CRWDSPCR (1993), also set for the performance at the Joyce, was made in collaboration with Lancaster and with the aid of a computer program. Cunningham, never set in his ways, began using a computer in 1991 and employed it for all of his choreography after 1991. The program in its earliest forms presented an interesting challenge for Cunningham (and his dancers): It did not understand physical constraints.  The result is a frenetic, mechanical-looking dance, one that absolutely requires the precision and technical prowess for which Cunningham dancers are known. Quartet (1986), a dance for five, with a score by David Tudor, is also on the program. The dance evokes isolation and estrangement, and Mr. Cunningham himself originated the role of the alienated central figure.

The Joyce, a stalwart dance organization which has nurtured "downtown" dance--smaller, less established companies doing work closer to the margins--for the last 30 years may also be in its twilight. Its lease, under the terms of which it currently pays $1 a year, is up in 2016, and a planned move to the World Trade Center area is looking increasingly untenable due to stalls in fund-raising and building. Talks between Eliot Feld, the Eighth Avenue theater's owner, and the Joyce Theater Foundation over who will retain the Joyce name continue. Mr. Feld rejected offers from the nonprofit to buy the space.

So this season is the last time MCDC performs at the Joyce, and the last time any of these works will be performed in New York City by MCDC. "It's the end of an era," said Ms. Perron.

The complex, looping retrospective begins as it ends, in 1972, on the day of her last performance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. “For me,” she writes, “it was the end of a twenty-year way of life.” Ms. Brown, often Mr. Cunningham’s onstage partner, was an exquisite dancer, with a fine line, impeccable technique and harmonious proportions—the first among equals on the company’s distaff side. Mr. Cunningham himself, now 87, is the undisputed éminence grise of modern dance, and he’s still making new work that defines modernist choreography.

Chance and Circumstance is a slippery mix of back story and forward motion, of large ideas and small details, in chapters that crisscross the country and then the globe. The New York art world is the center and crucible. As Ms. Brown writes: “Everything changed in the fifties: the painters sensed themselves differently; they’d become powerful and strong because they believed in themselves …. An undercurrent of optimism swept through the community, and it was a community then, a real family, a brotherhood …. This community of artists … attracted a whole new generation of painters, as well as writers, composers, and dancers (Earle and myself among them).”

The composer Earle Brown and Carolyn Rice had been high-school sweethearts and came to the West Village as young marrieds, lured by John Cage. They’d met in Denver, when Cage and Merce Cunningham were on a joint tour of the United States. “I needed a reason—a philosophical raison d’être—for a life in dance to which to devote myself,” she writes. “It was John Cage who provided that, though I didn’t realize it at the time.”

There it is: the guru factor that runs through the book. Cage lived then at 326 Monroe Street on the Lower East Side, almost under the Williamsburg Bridge. Also on the premises, called “the Bozza Mansion” after its landlord, were the composer Morton Feldman and the artists Ray Johnson and Richard Lippold. The fabled Artists Club and the Cedar Tavern were the hangouts, and the area around Eighth Street was hopping. Downtown, Ms. Brown took class and worked with Mr. Cunningham. Uptown, she was a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera, studied with Antony Tudor, adored the performances of Margot Fonteyn, saw Martha Graham and José Limón, and met Paul Taylor at the Juilliard School. She attended the New York City Ballet, and wasn’t so keen on Balanchine. But downtown was her home. “Washington Square, suddenly greened over, was a candy box full of lovers.”

In 1953, Carolyn Brown was dancing with Mr. Cunningham and road-tripping with Cage, Earle and M.C. Richards (of Black Mountain College fame). Cage, who died in 1992, was the de facto everything behind the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in those formative years: manager, booking agent, publicist, even driver—not to mention musical director and Merce’s life partner. If Mr. Cunningham was Carolyn’s partner onstage, Cage was, one senses, her partner offstage: In him, she found a friend and a soulmate, wise and merry.

Mr. Cunningham, on the other hand, appears in a less flattering light, as an “eccentric prince”—“naturally inclined toward secrecy, concealment, evasion, even furtiveness; it seems basic to his character.” Meanwhile, Cage “went to the other extreme: he was open, frank, ready to reveal all his most optimistic utopian schemes and dreams, willing to be a friend to anyone who sought him out.” Thus, a kind of good cop/bad cop dynamic emerges: “In the fifties and early sixties, whenever Merce became unaccountably withdrawn or black with pent-up fury … some of the dancers would turn to John …. [H]e’d attempt to soothe the hurt, make us laugh.”

There’s a similar dichotomy between the antic and madcap Robert Rauschenberg, the company’s first designer, and the more serious and sober Jasper Johns, who followed his friend Bob in the artistic-advisor role after a cataclysmic split between Rauschenberg and the company, mended only years later.

The organizing principle here is chronological, but, as one might expect of an author who danced for the choreographer who evolved a 360-degree front, there’s a tendency to move—to leap backwards and forwards and sideways. If writing is an out-of-body experience, dancing is the opposite, and somehow Carolyn Brown the dancer prevails. You travel out of your body and into hers. After a couple of hundred pages, you feel yourself under a spell, remembering her life the way she does: “[S]nuggled under blankets in my deck chair, I daydreamed in slow motion and minute detail back through each of the preceding days. All seventy of them.”

The narrative is informed by Ms. Brown’s diaries, notes, correspondence, research, and an uncanny and encyclopedic recall, both visual and physical—the latter being the muscle memory that enables dancers to remember steps. She also seems fueled by a desire to set the record straight, to put aside received wisdom and to tell things as she knew them to be. For instance, Mr. Cunningham once explained to an interviewer that the titles of his dances “did not necessarily reflect their content.” Ms. Brown responds: “To which I say, poppy-cock!”

Carolyn Brown writes with a Zen-like even-mindedness, and hence a disregard for the relative importance of facts and events. She gives us all and everything. This serenely indiscriminate inclusiveness lends to Chance and Circumstance the feel of life as it occurs: weather, lunch, love, elation, despair, dinner and its digestion; Rauschenberg’s red paintings, Peggy Guggenheim’s maid, a proposition from Willem de Kooning, a prophetic exchange with Yoko Ono; and dancing, dancing, dancing. Life as it’s lived.

And what a life! Near the book’s end, she notes that on the occasion of her last performances, Merce treated her “with exceptional kindness.” After her final bows, she went to his dressing room “to thank him. He said, ‘It’s been a wonderful twenty years. You’re beautiful and I’ve never told you enough.’”

Nancy Dalva is senior writer at 2wice.

What it doesn’t do, alas, is help me watch him. I just don’t care—or haven’t the intelligence to absorb—that he’s “mapped out the space, dividing it into 19 sections, each with 8 sub-areas,” as my friend Nancy Dalva recently reported in The Times; or that “He made the 128 movement sequences.” If you’re caught up in the dance, you’re not counting; and if you’re counting, you’re not caught up in the dance. (It’s the same with the notorious 32 fouettés in Swan Lake.)

Cunningham has just revived a very long piece, Ocean (1994), at the new and magnificent Rose Theater, whose performance area was reconfigured into a circle, the audience seated all around—with the 112(!) orchestral musicians, in the top balcony, also ringing the stage. At four points around the circle were placed digital monitors, counting off the seconds. ( Ocean lasts exactly 90 minutes.) No doubt this device was of help to the dancers in keeping track of where they were in the piece, since the sound (a layer of orchestral music by Andrew Culver and a layer of electronic music by David Tudor), although at times exciting and certainly ocean-suggestive, was hardly something the dancers could hold on to.

But the monitors performed another function as well: They gave us something to hold on to. Since Cunningham long ago dismissed narrative from his work (although he danced enough of it with Martha Graham) and also dismissed music as the basis of dance (although he studied at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet), the countdown provided a badly needed chronometric structure for the viewer—or at least for this viewer.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t take pleasure from innumerable ravishing passages among the outpourings of invention that Cunningham always provides. Clusters of dancers ran on from behind recessed curtains, sometimes working in twos, threes, fours, sometimes working alone. On occasion, a large group would be hectic with activity while a single couple across the circle would pose in absolute stillness, the woman in an endless supported arabesque; at other times, a couple would take a brilliantly original sculpted position on the floor, in contrast to the buzz of motion surrounding them. Twice, all 14 dancers claim the space together—climaxes we welcome, even if we don’t understand why they’re there. (Maybe just because they’re crowd-pleasers? Cunningham, despite his purity, is also a showman.)

The Cunningham vocabulary, with its tilts and nestlings and crooks of the limbs, provides him with endless opportunities that satisfy both viewer and dancer—his dancers never look less than happy and fulfilled in what they’re doing. And in this very long piece, the constant flow of events moved—yes—like an ocean tide. But we know why the ocean’s tide comes in and out; we’re not meant to know why Cunningham’s does, we’re only meant to accept. It’s hard, though, to break the habit of a lifetime, as he requires us to do. Perhaps animals, birds, butterflies really do live only in the moment; people, for good or ill, are stuck with both memory and anticipation.

Through Ocean’s 90 minutes, the pale unitards worn by the dancers at the start are exchanged for brighter ones; at the end, they’re all dark purple. That’s a straightforward progression. But it’s the only one I could identify, other than the inexorable flashings of the digital monitors, reminding me that this, too, would pass.

To go from Ocean to Giselle is a mighty leap, yet up the street, while Cunningham was holding court at the Rose, at the Met, A.B.T. was presenting a week of that Romantic masterpiece. Every ballerina feels she has to dance Giselle (it’s like Hamlet for actors), but not every ballerina is equipped to. Even so, two of the Giselles were remarkable, if for very different reasons. Diana Vishneva was giving her first New York Giselle; Amanda McKerrow her last. The symmetry was surely unintentional, yet it revealed a great deal, not least because it reminded us of how a great role is susceptible to an infinite variety of interpretations.

My own Giselles go back to Alicia Markova in the early 1940’s (not that I understood what I was seeing, but I’ve never forgotten her famous elevation and otherworldliness). Fonteyn, Ulanova, Alonso, Fracci, Makarova, Kirkland are among those who moved (or failed to move) me. But no one of them demonstrated as great a command of the pure dance elements of Giselle as Vishneva, whose single performance last week was even more astounding than her triumphs in Swan Lake the week before. Strictly adhering to the text, she presented the famous moments (well, they’re all famous) with such clarity and ease that they looked new—abstractly perfect in their execution, yet personal through the individuality of her technical prowess.

An example: At the start of Act II, Giselle goes slowly into an unsupported arabesque. It’s devilishly difficult to do it smoothly, let alone at a completely steady tempo; most ballerinas can’t hide their shakiness, or their anxiety about possible shakiness. Vishneva’s leg rose simply and inexorably in a calm adagio phrase—there was no anxiety because there was no problem: Shakiness was not a possibility. Later, she traversed the stage in a streak of lightning and perfect entrechats-quatre that she just flicked off without hesitation or effort, without even calling attention to them. The felicity and excitement of this moment, which can be so blurred and inconclusive!

Is she as great a Giselle as she is a dancer? Probably not. In Act I, she’s appropriately playful, then tragic; in Act II, exquisite and tenderly spiritual. But she doesn’t break your heart in the mad scene like Ulanova (or for that matter, Fonteyn or Makarova), or chill you with the frenzy, the dementia, that Spessivtseva reveals in the fragment of film I mentioned several weeks ago. Nor does she fully embody the love that extends beyond death the way, again, Ulanova did. Vishneva’s Giselle is first and foremost an embodiment of dance. But remember: Giselle, more than any other ballet, is about dance. Act I shows us a girl who insists on dancing even if it may cost her her life. Act II shows us men being forced to dance until they die. There’s every justification for a ballerina whose Giselle, however dramatically subtle and convincing, is ultimately more dancer than anything else.

Two nights after Vishneva came McKerrow, in her farewell performance after 23 years with the company, 18 of them as a principal. It’s been an odd career, not going quite so far as it might have (should have?). Because she doesn’t have the most powerful technique, lacking the kind of slam-bang virtuosity and salesmanship that A.B.T. often seems to prefer, she didn’t soar to the very top like a Cynthia Gregory or a Paloma Herrera. Instead, she’s made her career as a lyrical, dramatic dancer— intelligent, restrained, touching; wonderful in Tudor ( Pillar of Fire, for instance) … and in Giselle. This final performance was deeply moving, not only for her profound identification with the heroine but for her beautiful phrasing and lovely musicality. There’s no one like her left at A.B.T. now, and the audience knew it: The ovation that rose to meet her at the final curtain was spontaneous and heartfelt—and deserved.

What it doesn’t do, alas, is help me watch him. I just don’t care—or haven’t the intelligence to absorb—that he’s “mapped out the space, dividing it into 19 sections, each with 8 sub-areas,” as my friend Nancy Dalva recently reported in The Times; or that “He made the 128 movement sequences.” If you’re caught up in the dance, you’re not counting; and if you’re counting, you’re not caught up in the dance. (It’s the same with the notorious 32 fouettés in Swan Lake.)

Cunningham has just revived a very long piece, Ocean (1994), at the new and magnificent Rose Theater, whose performance area was reconfigured into a circle, the audience seated all around—with the 112(!) orchestral musicians, in the top balcony, also ringing the stage. At four points around the circle were placed digital monitors, counting off the seconds. (Ocean lasts exactly 90 minutes.) No doubt this device was of help to the dancers in keeping track of where they were in the piece, since the sound (a layer of orchestral music by Andrew Culver and a layer of electronic music by David Tudor), although at times exciting and certainly ocean-suggestive, was hardly something the dancers could hold on to.

But the monitors performed another function as well: They gave us something to hold on to. Since Cunningham long ago dismissed narrative from his work (although he danced enough of it with Martha Graham) and also dismissed music as the basis of dance (although he studied at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet), the countdown provided a badly needed chronometric structure for the viewer—or at least for this viewer.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t take pleasure from innumerable ravishing passages among the outpourings of invention that Cunningham always provides. Clusters of dancers ran on from behind recessed curtains, sometimes working in twos, threes, fours, sometimes working alone. On occasion, a large group would be hectic with activity while a single couple across the circle would pose in absolute stillness, the woman in an endless supported arabesque; at other times, a couple would take a brilliantly original sculpted position on the floor, in contrast to the buzz of motion surrounding them. Twice, all 14 dancers claim the space together—climaxes we welcome, even if we don’t understand why they’re there. (Maybe just because they’re crowd-pleasers? Cunningham, despite his purity, is also a showman.)

The Cunningham vocabulary, with its tilts and nestlings and crooks of the limbs, provides him with endless opportunities that satisfy both viewer and dancer—his dancers never look less than happy and fulfilled in what they’re doing. And in this very long piece, the constant flow of events moved—yes—like an ocean tide. But we know why the ocean’s tide comes in and out; we’re not meant to know why Cunningham’s does, we’re only meant to accept. It’s hard, though, to break the habit of a lifetime, as he requires us to do. Perhaps animals, birds, butterflies really do live only in the moment; people, for good or ill, are stuck with both memory and anticipation.

Through Ocean’s 90 minutes, the pale unitards worn by the dancers at the start are exchanged for brighter ones; at the end, they’re all dark purple. That’s a straightforward progression. But it’s the only one I could identify, other than the inexorable flashings of the digital monitors, reminding me that this, too, would pass.

To go from Ocean to Giselle is a mighty leap, yet up the street, while Cunningham was holding court at the Rose, at the Met, A.B.T. was presenting a week of that Romantic masterpiece. Every ballerina feels she has to dance Giselle (it’s like Hamlet for actors), but not every ballerina is equipped to. Even so, two of the Giselles were remarkable, if for very different reasons. Diana Vishneva was giving her first New York Giselle; Amanda McKerrow her last. The symmetry was surely unintentional, yet it revealed a great deal, not least because it reminded us of how a great role is susceptible to an infinite variety of interpretations.

My own Giselles go back to Alicia Markova in the early 1940’s (not that I understood what I was seeing, but I’ve never forgotten her famous elevation and otherworldliness). Fonteyn, Ulanova, Alonso, Fracci, Makarova, Kirkland are among those who moved (or failed to move) me. But no one of them demonstrated as great a command of the pure dance elements of Giselle as Vishneva, whose single performance last week was even more astounding than her triumphs in Swan Lake the week before. Strictly adhering to the text, she presented the famous moments (well, they’re all famous) with such clarity and ease that they looked new—abstractly perfect in their execution, yet personal through the individuality of her technical prowess.

An example: At the start of Act II, Giselle goes slowly into an unsupported arabesque. It’s devilishly difficult to do it smoothly, let alone at a completely steady tempo; most ballerinas can’t hide their shakiness, or their anxiety about possible shakiness. Vishneva’s leg rose simply and inexorably in a calm adagio phrase—there was no anxiety because there was no problem: Shakiness was not a possibility. Later, she traversed the stage in a streak of lightning and perfect entrechats-quatre that she just flicked off without hesitation or effort, without even calling attention to them. The felicity and excitement of this moment, which can be so blurred and inconclusive!

Is she as great a Giselle as she is a dancer? Probably not. In Act I, she’s appropriately playful, then tragic; in Act II, exquisite and tenderly spiritual. But she doesn’t break your heart in the mad scene like Ulanova (or for that matter, Fonteyn or Makarova), or chill you with the frenzy, the dementia, that Spessivtseva reveals in the fragment of film I mentioned several weeks ago. Nor does she fully embody the love that extends beyond death the way, again, Ulanova did. Vishneva’s Giselle is first and foremost an embodiment of dance. But remember: Giselle, more than any other ballet, is about dance. Act I shows us a girl who insists on dancing even if it may cost her her life. Act II shows us men being forced to dance until they die. There’s every justification for a ballerina whose Giselle, however dramatically subtle and convincing, is ultimately more dancer than anything else.

Two nights after Vishneva came McKerrow, in her farewell performance after 23 years with the company, 18 of them as a principal. It’s been an odd career, not going quite so far as it might have (should have?). Because she doesn’t have the most powerful technique, lacking the kind of slam-bang virtuosity and salesmanship that A.B.T. often seems to prefer, she didn’t soar to the very top like a Cynthia Gregory or a Paloma Herrera. Instead, she’s made her career as a lyrical, dramatic dancer— intelligent, restrained, touching; wonderful in Tudor (Pillar of Fire, for instance) … and in Giselle. This final performance was deeply moving, not only for her profound identification with the heroine but for her beautiful phrasing and lovely musicality. There’s no one like her left at A.B.T. now, and the audience knew it: The ovation that rose to meet her at the final curtain was spontaneous and heartfelt—and deserved.

The best included the recent triumphant Paul Taylor season, the highlights of the Martha Graham season, and for those of us who happened to be in Miami, Ballet Imperial at Miami City Ballet, the finest performances of this Balanchine masterpiece that I've seen in many years.

But dance critics are rarely spared the worst for long, as the last few weeks go to prove. And of the worst, what's been the very worst? I've been disputing this point with a seasoned colleague. When I put it to her that Dwight Rhoden's 7th Heaven, trotted out for us at the Joyce by Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, might be the worst ballet of the past five years, she countered with Boris Eifman's Musagète. To which I argued that while Musagète was certainly more offensive, the Rhoden was more inept. We agreed to disagree.

7th Heaven is set to hunks of Beethoven's Seventh (get the joke of the title?) interrupted by stretches of Bach called "Juxtapositions." That idea alone would have doomed the project, but Rhoden's inability to deploy dancers in groups would have undone a work made to any other music. A few of my notes: Hideous costumes. Ugly vocabulary-splayed legs and crooked knees. Unmusical. Pretentious. Confused. Dull.

Nor could anything be duller than the first ballet on Pittsburgh's program, Kevin O'Day's Sting/ING Situations. Another jokey title: The music is a group of songs by Sting. Those of us who have endured previous Kevin O'Day pieces accept that he's one long yawn, that he just churns out yards of material, all of it formulaic. Sting's music didn't help-it's not very danceable-and there were more hideous costumes. This serving of dance cliché went on for 35 minutes.

Pittsburgh's third offering was Derek Deane's Hungry Heart … "We all have one"!! to-yes, you guessed it-songs by Bruce Springsteen. This too lacked original dance moments, but at least it looked good in its cocktail-lounge setting, involved a group of identifiable characters and had some shape to it. But it's time to get the word out to provincial companies that choreographing to rock music isn't a sure bet in the Big Apple, even though it may be cutting edge back home. This company, under the direction of Patricia Wilde, a former formidable City Ballet dancer, had made a respected name for itself. Under new direction, it's become a vacuum.

The Eifman vs. Rhoden debate took place before the National Ballet of Canada brought its production of James Kudelka's The Contract (The Pied Piper) to B.A.M. On the Saturday night I saw it, the Lexington Avenue Express decided not to go to Brooklyn. Alas, something called the J line eventually got me there. At least I had a book with me for the ride, whereas it was too dark to read during the 80 intermissionless minutes of The Contract.

On the theory that if a ballet is going to tell a story, it should be able to convey it through movement, I didn't bother with the plot summary in the program. As a result, although I grasped that the opening sequence was a play within a play-an amateur production, kids and all, of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," to a recitation of Browning's text, set in what appeared to be a huge school gym/auditorium-I hadn't the faintest idea until I was back on the subway that the boy and girl who dance a puppy-love duet were an engaged couple named Will and Dot; that a very distressed lady was Dot's mother; that everyone became afflicted with a movement disease (I had thought that was just Kudelka's normal vocabulary); that the gracious and lovely lady in flowing garb who suddenly turns up and contracts to cure them all by a laying-on of hands is named Eva; and that Eva is meant to suggest the famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

I did understand that when Will and Eva find themselves alone together and he whips off his pants, standing there in nothing but his boxers-a first in ballet?-there's going to be Passion followed by Trouble. The Elders of the community come upon them more or less in flagrante and are not amused. The leading one, who's sporting something like a long black skirt and had his own eye on Eva, is particularly put out, but then you would be, too, if you had to rush around in such a clumsy schmatte denouncing people while a handsome young guy in his undies is grabbing the spotlight.

I leave it to the program notes to tell you what happens next: The Elder "separates the two lovers, striking Will to the ground and calling on the community to nullify Eva's contract. Only Dot's mother defends Eva. Eva fights back, but the contract is broken. [Where were her agent and lawyer?] The children, silent observers, weigh the arguments being acted out and cast Eva in the role of the wronged Pied Piper. As the community struggles to restore order, Eva leads the children away."

The tedium of all this was close to unbearable, despite Michael Torke's overexcited score featuring heavenly voices soaring ever upwards. There were 54 performers onstage, 18 of them children, and the kids seemed to be having a good time. At least somebody was. In its defense, I have to acknowledge that despite its pretensions and longueurs, at least The Contract made no use of dry ice, had no flashing red lights and wasn't multi-media.

Neil Greenberg's Partial View was. This was another intermissionless event (translation: There's no escape), although there was a brief pause between Greenberg's 12- or 13-minute solo and the far longer section featuring two couples and the video projections of John Jesurun. (There were no videos to distract us from the solo.) Neil Greenberg, now in his 40's, danced with Merce Cunningham from 1979 to 1986, and Cunningham is clearly the big influence. But there's none of Cunningham's mastery on display in the solo-just endless exhibitionistic doodling. This from the man who recently told an interviewer that "being a choreographer was starting to feel a little bit like masturbation."

If there was any reason for anything in the main body of Partial View to take place at any given moment-or at all-I couldn't discern it. The four dancers were working hard, as dancers always do, but when everything appears random, nothing seems to mean anything. A huge split screen flashed video sequences of the dancers even as they danced (there were cameras strategically placed and then re-placed around the stage), so that we got to see the real thing and the filmed thing dwarfing it at the same time. And then there were other repeated images: a woman swimming, another woman walking down a path, bombs exploding over Baghdad.

Both Greenberg and Jesurun have enjoyed awards, honors, international careers. They're very, very serious, and they let you know it. In an "Artist Statement," Greenberg spells out what he's up to: "I'm obsessed with the particular kinds of meaning-sensual, perceptual, ontological-that dance can provide …. I like performance that walks the tightrope between looking at 'the thing' and, simultaneously, being 'the thing'-between an analytical cool and heart-on-sleeve expression. I'm attracted to the daringly experimental and the theatrically powerful. And to subtle virtuosity, elegance and humor." He's attracted to these things, but he doesn't manage to exemplify them. To put it directly: He's boring.

Large talent, of course, can't be legislated into existence, and it's not the fault of the Rhodens and O'Days and Kudelkas and Greenbergs that they don't have it. But let's not be deceived by the culture's machinery of publicity and self-promotion or by our ardent longing for the real thing. That we have so few first-rate choreographers today is a sad fact; better to accept it than to lie to ourselves.

The early sections of Revelations remind you yet again that Ailey studied with a number of the modern masters, including Martha Graham. The influence isn't just in the way he shapes the bodies of his dancers, and the way they move; it's in the spirit with which he addresses his story. You see it again in one of his more successful earlier works, Hidden Rites from 1973, revived this season. Graham is lurking, especially in the first section, "Incantation," a duet for the company's glamour couple, Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell and Clifton Brown. Brown calls to mind those big, handsome guys Graham favored, from Erick Hawkins to Paul Taylor to Bertram Ross. Fisher-Harrell has the Graham intensity as well as striking beauty. I don't know whether today's Graham company leases its ballets, but if Ailey could borrow Cave of the Heart from them, what a Medea Fisher-Harrell would make! And what a welcome addition a Graham masterpiece would be to the endlessly meretricious Ailey repertory.

Speaking of meretricious, let's tip our hat to the latest exploitative exercise by David Parsons: Shining Star, to the hits of Earth, Wind and Fire. The music was live (it was so overmiked, the ear glazed over), but that doesn't mean anything really live took place. (The 70's didn't seem live even when we were trapped in them.) Parsons gives us a disco look and a disco beat-hips swiveling and grinding away, everybody working overtime at being sexy. The dancers are provided with moves, not steps, and the resulting dances are relentlessly vacuous-strings of clichés trotted out, in this case to create a neo-Vegas jumble for the middle-aged audience to whoop along with. I'm glad someone was having fun.

There was more fun to be had-but not much more-from Donald Byrd's Burlesque, new to the company. Eight dancers impersonate burlesque-house characters-the strippers, the slapstick comics-and they try hard. Too hard. It's pastiche, it's repetitive, and it's much too long, but Byrd is a respectable choreographer and he knows what he's doing. If only the girls didn't keep slipping and tripping to the floor-ha ha!-and if only they didn't have to get into the predictable catfight. Most important, if only Byrd hadn't made the ruinous mistake of setting this harmless, predictable romp to some of Louis Armstrong's greatest music. The dancing is so insignificantly busy, busy, busy, and the trumpet is so magnificent and pure, it's as if the performers are accompanying the music rather than the other way round.

Another early Ailey piece was revived- Night Creature, an uneasy blend of Ailey's Broadway mode with ballet: jetés, lifts, arabesques, everything but pointe shoes. But where is Ailey's own language? Did he actually have a language? He certainly knew how to move dancers around the stage effectively, but he didn't use Ellington's music to tell us anything. For the audience, it was another automatic whoopathon. But to give them credit, they were also responsive to Elisa Monte's mysterious, passionate duet Treading; the control and intensity Fisher-Harrell and Brown bring to it make a powerful impression. This piece, now 25 years old, remains one of the few truly estimable things in the Ailey repertory.

The big premiere was Love Stories, a mixed bag and a mixed blessing. The choreography is "by Judith Jamison with Robert Battle and Rennie Harris"; the music is Stevie Wonder; the idea is "a journey through the past, present and future." Jamison, as weak a choreographer as she is a strong personality, leads off with a solo performed by the indispensable Clifton Brown which suggests the beginnings of the Ailey company in a bare studio. (The Ailey zeitgeist is almost pathologically self-reflecting.) After a lot of Jamison's generic doodling, things go into high gear with Rennie Harris' modified hip-hop routines-and as usual, they're thrilling. This is the dance of the moment, ingeniously theatricalized, whereas the other social dances sampled-the Lindy, the Philly bop et al.-come across as nostalgic pastiche; they look as if they've been ironed out. When the lithe, feral Dwana Adiaha Smallwood takes over with her incandescent, galvanic energy and swagger, you're swept away. At last, someone is presenting her front and center! (I still cherish my dream that one day we'll get to see her as Josephine Baker, bananas and all.) And then there's Abdur-Rahim Jackson, who must have appeared to Harris as the answer to a prayer: He's the real thing, while most of the other hip-hoppers are just gamely going along. With Love Stories' final section-the Robert Battle mystical section-we're back in generic-land, only this time it's generic portentousness. But at least we've had a stretch of real dance excitement along the way.

From the City Center to the Joyce is a matter of 30-odd blocks, but from Alvin Ailey to Merce Cunningham is a leap across galaxies. Ailey's Broadway-Africanisms give way to Cunningham's perpetual avant-gardisms. The Master, now in his mid-80's and looking sadly but bravely frail as he's helped onto the stage for a curtain call, is still calling the shots that have made him revered-and that have sunk the efforts of imitative admirers who lack his talent.

This season brought us four "Events," each performed twice. And what is a Cunningham event? A sampling from works he created as long ago as the early 60's and as recently as the day before yesterday. For approximately 75 minutes, the mini-events that make up each maxi-event flow-sometimes seamlessly, sometimes not-into the next. There's different music (or sound) for each performance, to which, apparently, the performers are not introduced until the day in question. There are different costumes nightly-those I saw were uniformly unattractive. At Event One, the dancers were sheathed in tight body stockings from throat to ankle, all decorated in the kind of horizontal stripes that make you look even thicker than you already are. At Event Two, they were either magenta slashed and splashed with acid green or acid green splashed and slashed with magenta, with a little relief from white up toward the face. Their garishness could almost have been maliciously designed to distract you from the dancers themselves.

As for the sound, it was generally unbearable-electronic grunts, shrieks, peeps, farts, with, at Event One, a live trombone thrown in to horrible effect; at Event Two, there was a less intrusive piano. (You'll have guessed that I missed Events Three and Four.) Luckily, one can honorably tune the "music" out, since it proceeds separately from the dance and seems to have no bearing on it. A generous friend offered me her earplugs, but I nobly declined.

Once you get past the brutalities of sound and décor, there's the dancing itself. Cunningham's choreography-far from being random, or left to chance, or spontaneous, as many people think it is-is highly organized and brilliantly specific. Almost every moment shines with felicity, at least as his 14 devoted dancers perform it. The language is chaste and delicate, the encounters between dancers brief, almost glancing. There are a few sequences where something recognizably narrative appears to be taking place-a stylized game of jacks; a tender reaching out of a hand to a face. But then we're back to the purity of just plain movement in the just plain moment. So that if you can suspend the very human desire for progress to something, with no arc provided either by the drama of story or the drama of music, you can come away fulfilled. And even Cunningham compromises by delivering some kind of finale for each Event. But by the time they turn up, you're so conditioned by the earlier apparent absence of structure that they seem artificial and pasted on.

As the samplings stream past, you can't help trying to attribute meaning to their sequencing-there must be a reason why this trio is followed by this quartet, why these five dancers rush onto the stage at exactly this moment. After all, life itself presents an inevitable sequence-from birth to death: How can we not be affected by it? Cunningham denies us everything Ailey thrusts down our throats-specious excitations, spurious entertainment. It's a blessed relief. And yet how long can one live on such rarefied high-mindedness? Cunningham's accomplishment over the 50 years of his company's existence has served as a necessary corrective to much of what was taking place in Western dance, and he deserves the respect, even the veneration in which he's held. But I have to admit that after two servings of Events, I felt the way I remember feeling in Kyoto after several evenings of exquisitely authentic Japanese high cuisine: that I had to have, right away, an ice-cream cone-with sprinkles, and a Coke on the side.

It's the tension between the over-the-top slapstick, the ruthless ambushing of the ballets we most love, and the disturbing yet moving vision of men striving to conquer ballerina roles that gives the Trocks their distinction and makes them more than a high-camp joke. The best of the guys are first-rate dancers who are happily at home dancing these prima roles. Robert Carter (Olga Supphozova), hurtling around the stage as Liberty Bell in the big slam-bang pas de deux from Balanchine's Stars and Stripes , or tossing off triples in Paquita , would be triumphing in those very roles in "normal" ballet companies if he'd only bothered to be a girl. He's wonderful-polished, musical, commanding (think Monique Meunier); he's got style, not just attitude, so he registers less as a man in drag than as a somewhat hefty ballerina. Yet because he is a guy in a tutu, he's also very funny. Carter and several of his colleagues, with their rock-solid pointe work, masculine power in turns and fouettés, and dynamic traversals of the stage, actually make a kind of case for men in women's roles: They give us an alternate universe of the ballerina in which force takes the place of beauty. It's tantalizing-at least until the lights come up.

The Trocks' Swan Lake Act II is a happy corrective to those dreary productions we're constantly being subjected to. The eight corps swans peck away when they're not breaking into the breast stroke. The world's tiniest Benno (Mr. Slowpokin) collapses under the weight of the formidable Odette (Madame Lofatkina). Prince Siegfried (Pepe Dufka) may have very little elevation, but his wig is even more ludicrously golden than those sported by so many Soviet and post-Soviet danseurs. And the whole gang gets hopelessly lost trying to decode all that undecipherable mime. (The Kirov version just leaves it out; the Trocks make Harpo look contained.) But through it all glimmers a real Swan Lake -of sorts.

As for the company's new Don Q , Fifi Barkova (Manolo Molina), with her Hitler hair-comb and grimly flirty Spanishisms, takes center stage and fights to keep it. There's a glorious parody of a Petipa vision scene with the corps in bright blue, waving fairy wands, and of course the inevitable Don Quixote Pas de Deux , carried off with panache by Barkova's Kitri and her Basil (R. M. "Prince" Myshkin), until she breaks his spirit. Don't mess with Kitri!

The big event of the season is the return to the Trocks of choreographer Peter Anastos after a quarter-century of disaffection. His signature pieces for the company- Go for Barocco and Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet , parodies of Balanchine and Robbins-are probably the Trocks' best-known works, and rightly, because they don't simply mimic the mannerisms of their targets; they stand, as it were, as seditious new works by these masters.

The new Anastos piece, La Trovatiara Pas de Cinq , is relatively minor, because its target is less challenging, but it's a real comic ballet, not just a joke. The giant and gorgeous Nadia Rombova (Jai Williams),with her far-flung extensions and the softest toe shoes ever seen-she's all knuckled over-dominates as a kind of harem or pirate girl, swirling her skirts and beaming her relentless grin. Two other big wild hussies and two teensy guys flashing teensy swords fill out the pas de cinq with the help of Verdi. It's all pure fun and games in the backwash of Le Corsaire , a spoof by a true choreographer who knows how to put a ballet together.

It's a terrible thing to confess, but I got more pleasure from the Trocks than I did from the recent brief Merce Cunningham season at the State Theater. Yes, he's a master. Yes, he has superb dancers: the astonishing Holley Farmer, with her helmet of cropped red hair, dancing full-out and thrillingly; dark-haired Jennifer Goggans, a relative newcomer, outstanding in every situation; electric Ashley Chen, exciting Robert Swinston-there are no weak links. Yes, it was fun listening to Cunningham and his long-time associate David Vaughan dryly reciting the anecdotes that help make up the background to the 1965 How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (although I have to protest the slighting reference to peanut-butter pie). And yes, it was important to bring back two major Cunningham works: Suite for Five (1956-1958) and Fabrications (1987). I had never seen the former, and found it very beautiful.

But the new piece, Loose Time , which appeared on both programs, seemed like an effort of will, trying too hard to be groundbreaking. And the surround of Merce-worship-the season was heralded as "Fifty Years of Forward Motion"-was hard to take, particularly given a self-congratulatory film shown to captive audiences at every performance. No doubt all the 50th-anniversary fuss was in the noble cause of fund-raising, but the danger of this kind of thing is that it can come across as vanity.

A different kind of milestone was celebrated, if that's the word, by Oregon Ballet Theater earlier in the summer: the imminent departure of artistic director/choreographer James Canfield. All the ballets were by Mr. Canfield and all of them were lousy. But there are degrees of lousiness: Up , set to seven recordings of Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon," was less offensive than three pas de deux set to Chopin, Philip Glass and the Doors. And it's been quite a while since I've seen anything more offensive than Coco , in which recordings by Edith Piaf, among others, were deployed to vulgarize the life of Coco Chanel. Five chorus boys started things off in little black hats with flying feathers; there was lots of lugubrious lighting and far too much silhouetting (a Canfield specialty); and the lady dancing Chanel was both undernourished and overtaxed. Mr. Canfield is a Joffrey graduate, and he's a throwback to the Robert Joffrey–Gerald Arpino aesthetic. I report on this fiasco only to point out that the life of a dance critic is not all cakes and ale.

If further proof of that were needed, consider the most disturbing news of the dance year: the abrupt firing of the eminent critic Tobi Tobias, who has been an ornament to New York magazine for 22 years. Ms. Tobias can be lacerating and she can be rhapsodic; what she has never been is dishonest or half-hearted.

Ms. Tobias was originally told by New York 's editor, Caroline Miller, that she was being dismissed for "budgetary reasons," and Ms. Miller quickly announced that dance coverage would from now on consist of listings, previews and occasional feature articles. (In other words, P.R., not criticism.) But when she was bombarded with protests about the elimination of serious dance writing from her magazine, she started to change her line. Indeed, the only joy one can take in this sorry business lies in comparing versions (I've seen five) of the explanations she has been giving out. Early on, she told the Los Angeles Times that "it's no surprise to anyone that the audience for dance has diminished." (In other words, dance criticism is now commercially expendable.) But the protests escalated, Ms. Miller met with several distressed and highly vocal representatives of the dance world, and she is now eagerly looking forward to "New directions, new voices and new opportunities." The implication: Ms. Tobias was fired not for budgetary reasons but because she stands for old directions, old voices and old opportunities. It's a classic case of blame-the-victim.

Is Ms. Miller on the level? Over the past year, just about every critic has seen his or her space shrink, presumably so that the magazine can continue devoting itself to weightier topics, like restaurants, shopping and the Hamptons. Daniel Mendelsohn recently quit after finishing a two-year gig (he won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for book criticism), in part because the space allotted to books had been sharply reduced. He hasn't been replaced; such book reviews as appear sporadically are by staff writers. One of the other New York critics with whom I've spoken told me that when he asked whether the space he was losing was likely to be restored, he was told, "Not in the foreseeable future." My guess is that Ms. Miller simply miscalculated when she tried to pull in her budgetary horns still further by getting rid of the dance column, and is now trying to put the best possible face on things.

Are any of the other major critics endangered? Perhaps not, giventheoutrageMs. Miller has stirred up, no doubt to her astonishment: After all, if the "audience for dance" is so "diminished," who's making all the fuss? Still, if I were Peter G. Davis (classical music), Mark Stevens (art) or John Leonard (TV), I'd be looking over my shoulder. (Movie reviews, of course, are sacred, and I doubt that Ms.Millerisfoolish enough to tangle with theater critic John Simon.) As for Ms. Tobias, she will undoubtedly find other places to write about dance. But the issue isn't personal. Every art form needs educated and uncompromising criticism to keep itself honest. Eliminating a major voice from an important venue-either for budgetary reasons or to bring in someone trendier-is not merely a dance-world scandal, it's a dark comment on the priorities of today's journalism.