The Great Leap Forward

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>MERGE CUNNINGHAM, 46, Dropped-Out from the Graham company 21 years ago because of her "psychological drift." He didn't want a mother figure, he wanted Dada instead. Ever since, he has been one jump beyond the avantgarde. He was among the first American choreographers to use musique concrète, the first to leave the structure of a ballet to chance. He rehearses in silence so that his dancers will not be influenced by the music. Themes? "Supply your own," he says. Yet for all his seeming whimsy, Cunningham is a dancer and choreographer with serious intentions. He wants to take chances, shift the angles of balance, create new patterns that will be as distinctly different as the mobiles of Alexander Calder.

Rhythmically and spatially, like commuters crisscrossing in a train depot, his dancers move independently of one another. The effect is often riveting. Summerspace evokes moods and memories of sunshiny days by the sea; How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run, danced to the accompaniment of Composer John Cage sitting onstage, smoking, drinking champagne and reading aloud from his memoirs, is zany, true, and touching all at once.

>ALWIN NIKOLAIS, 56, is a Flipped-Out, plugged into a high-voltage fantasy world where stage and sound effect share equal billing with the dancers. In Vaudeville of the Elements, figures in bulging fluorescent balloons waddle and contract like pregnant accordians. One dancer wrestles with a space-age cobweb. Others, with illuminated lampshades on their hands and feet, do a close-order drill. Now the dancers are drunken caterpillars, now they are partnering their own distorted shadows. All the while, nine speakers ringing the auditorium sizzle, crackle and explode with electronic music; twelve slide projectors and 30 spots splash colors across the stage like an aurora borealis gone amuck. Nikolais, an ex-puppeteer who creates the music as well as the costumes and lighting for his dances, calls these trips into the twilight zones his "esthetic Rorschach." Some of Nikolais' Flipped-Out spirit is reflected in the work of one of his dancers, Murray Louis, whose Junk Dances is a kind of op art satire in motion.

Hovering between and beyond these styles are the Hung-Up, Freaked-Out and Put-Down. Ann Halprin, 47, wife of San Francisco Architect Lawrence Halprin, is a Hung-Up who likes to hang up her dance-workshop students on a cargo net and, shifting their positions in the webbing, stage a kind of spider-and-fly routine. Erick Hawkins, 54, Graham's former husband, is a Freaked-Out who finds Method in the madness of portraying such things as a pine tree and a shy squash. His movements, though, are often so blandly repetitive that he would do better to imitate a dancer. Anna Sokolow, 55, is a Put-Down whose searing, bleak dances are a condemnation of society's ills. Try as she may, she can't seem to manage a smile. Last year she set out to strike an upbeat note in Time Plus 7 by having teen-agers frugging to jazz; in the end, she had the boys straggle out in Army coats with bloody bandages wrapped around their heads. "I tried to end it happily," she moans, "but how could I with everything that's happening in the world today?"