Merce Cunningham is a living legend in contemporary dance. In 1944 he starred in Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring, the dance that heralded a new era. Last September at the Barbican he presented Fluid Canvas, his latest work, and performed as a reader in his How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run from 1965. Now aged 83, he has been making dance for over 60 years, always at the forefront and constantly re-inventing himself. In all this he has made use of three approaches: collaboration, chance and technology.
Cunningham’s artist collaborators form a
history of modern art: Robert Rauschenberg was the Company’s first resident
designer and Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman are amongst those
who have designed sets. Cunningham’s works have nearly all been set to new
music and the list of composers is similarly impressive, including La Monte
Young, Brian Eno and Gavin Bryars. John Cage was Cunningham’s closest
collaborator from 1942 up until his death in 1992, writing music for many
key works. They lived together for 50 years, although Cunningham was always
coy about their relationship, perhaps still reflecting the less open times
of fifties America. Together they discovered the I Ching, which brought the
idea of chance into their lives and works. When consulting the hexagrams
Cage would toss coins whilst Cunningham preferred an octahedral dice.
This dice plays a huge role in Cunningham’s creative process: ‘I use chance
as much as feasible’. It can determine many aspects of a work, from the
overarching structure down to the detailed positions of dancers’ hands. Once
made, though, the choreography is fixed; this is chance not chaos.
Cunningham also looks to the unexpected in his collaborations, achieved by
separating the creative process behind each of the three elements of the
performance: choreography, design and music. For a new work Cunningham now
commissions the music by giving the composer just the duration, often down
to the second, and for the designs gives the artist just an inspirational
phrase. Rauschenberg was asked to ‘think of a night as if it were day’ and
Suzanne Gallo was told just to ‘think misty’. Rehearsals are conducted in
silence on an empty stage and only at the dress rehearsal or first night do
the three elements come together. The dancers find themselves performing to
music they have not heard before, with only a chance relation to the rhythm
of the dance, and on a set they haven’t seen before, having to accommodate
artworks such as Warhol’s silver balloons. Such risks show Cunningham’s
extraordinary confidence in himself, his dancers and collaborators, and are
what makes a premiere such a special occasion.
In addition to the repertory of new and old works, since 1964 Cunningham has developed a new way of presentation in the form of an ongoing series of events held in museums and galleries. These are site-specific performances where a new piece is made by combining sections of older works, usually chosen by chance, but set to new music and with sets either newly commissioned or formed from the artworks in situ.
Cunningham has always embraced technology, collaborating with directors like Charles Atlas and Arthur Penn in film and video to archive performances and create dance films, together discovering the difference between the wide-open stage space and the penetrating eye of the camera. The realisation of technology’s possibilities has led Cunningham further into the digital world: making dance on computers and collaborating with digital artists.
In 1991 Cunningham started using Life Forms, a computer program for animating figures. Working in close collaboration, its inventors at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia have developed a sophisticated tool which Cunningham now uses for all his choreography. On his laptop at home or in the studio he can rapidly try out the many variations of his ideas that chance throws up, working far quicker than with real dancers. The computer has noticeably influenced these later works; they are faster and more complex, moves are repeated but each time subtly changed, and sequences are played out forward then backward. Cunningham says, ‘With the computer complexity it is possible. I see the chance to do something else and to break down recognisable rhythms. In a count of one-two-three I can now do five things before I get to two. It’s no longer just a matter of fast or slow but of more or less.’
Paul Kaiser is a digital artist who has made four works with Cunningham; variously collaborating with Marc Downie, an MIT expert in artificial intelligence, Shelley Eshkar, a multi-media artist and computer animator, and the programmers Susan Amkraut and Michael Girard. The first, made in 1998, was å, a digital dance projection, which combined the freedom of animation with the fluidity and realism of motion-capture, where a dancer’s movement is filmed by an array of video cameras allowing a computer to track in 3-D the motions of certain highlighted key body points which are then reconstructed in the virtual world.
BIPED, from 1999, was a more ambitious work. Animated dancers were projected onto a gauze in front of the stage, so that the ensemble appeared to be dancing with digital versions of themselves. Kaiser also manipulated the motion-capture data to construct distorted figures and to drive blocks of colour which moved to the dancers’ rhythms. This manipulation was taken further in 2001 in Loops, a digital portrait of Merce Cunningham based on his 1971 solo of the same title. The motion-capture data points were not connected anatomically but followed a complex set of artificial intelligence rules so that each loop of the cycle of the dance never repeated. This method was also employed in the most recent work, Lifelike, the projection work used in Fluid Canvas. Lifelike included the motion of Cunningham’s hands as well as animals, notably a horse – a homage to Eadweard Muybridge, the nineteenth-century photographer noted for his studies of both people and animals in motion. According to Kaiser, ‘Merce has opened up my world conceptually, the notion of the random and the sense that no point in space or time is privileged.’
Cunningham and Kaiser are both sceptical of the possibilities for purely virtual dance. Cunningham insists, ‘My purpose is always human,’ while Kaiser writes, ‘The more we embellish dance with technology, the more we start longing to see the real thing again, real dancers in real time and real space, with no distractions.’ It is this dynamic between the virtual world where anything is possible and physical reality where muscles meet gravity that is so exciting. Other choreographers agree: Kaiser has since worked with Bill T. Jones; Wayne McGregor of Random Dance has used computer-generated projected images in recent works and choreographed a virtual performance; and Mark Baldwin, the new Artistic Director of Ballet Rambert, has been using a version of Life Forms to make choreographic notes. Technology is continually opening up new possibilities for dance and Cunningham’s collaboration with artists and his embrace of both the dice and the laptop is keeping his Company at the forefront of contemporary dance in this, their 50th anniversary year.
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company is
planning an event at Tate Modern in October 2003 in the Turbine Hall within
the installation artwork of Olafur Eliasson.
www.merce.org
PEDESTRIAN, a public projection by Paul
Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, is on view at The Studio Museum in Harlem and
Rockefeller Plaza, New York, until 23 March 2003, where it will be
accessible both day and night to passers-by. It will be shown concurrently
in Karlsruhe, Germany, as part of Future Cinema at the ZKM.
www.pedestrianweb.org
Dominic Palfreyman is an investor and founder of The Felix Trust for the Arts