The final decisions for the dance to be seen after intermission are announced by Cunningham himself. Clothing designer Isaac Mizrahi tosses the dice that decides Radiohead will be the first accompanying band, by an even/odd chance. The music of Sigur Ross will follow. In Cunningham’s 50-year body of work, music has always been separate from the movement, an idea that began in his collaboration with John Cage. “The dancers can be free to respond [to the music] on their own terms,” says
Cunningham[1] style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref1′>.
Backstage the piece is minted, in tonight’s form, while the program opens with
the 2002 “Fluid Canvas.”
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>This first dance is set to John
King’s electronic mix of sampled jackhammer and conveyer belt sounds. Costume
designer James Hall’s blue and purple reflective unitards are dramatically lit
against a blue d�cor. Computer assisted white lines and dots project a
perpetual permutation of mathematical shapes. They seem to direct the dancer’s
complex rhythms. 16 in “Fluid Canvas” dance mostly in their own orbit but are
sometimes lovingly paired. His innovative and beautiful pas de deux is the
culmination of a lifelong quest for a duet that was not a romantic narrative.
This is not to say that his dances are “abstract.” Their movement imitates the
natural world. Two, like atoms, bump up against each other; the requisite duets
are playful. A crescent shape emerges from the doodles on screen and the
lighting evokes moonlight. Amid bobbing and running, the midnight blue turns
aqua, coincidentally the cosmic constellations on screen turn to fish. In an
unexpectedly glamorous bent over pose, the dancers carry each other off stage.
A threesome sits as if enjoying an afternoon on the Grande Jatte. All come out
in a statuesque walk. In a final flurry of activity, the dance does not so much
end as it does leave off; the dancers leap and bound with arms spread aerially.
The lifeform computer program Cunningham has used to choreograph for the past
ten years has become not just a tool, but also a subject of the performance. In
the 1999 work “Biped,” skeletal lines of light—the digital figures, dance on
the stage with the company in the real-time performance. Now in his eighties,
this choreographer’s hand is his most functional tool
href="https://nyartsmagazine.net/new/#_ftn2">
class=MsoFootnoteReference>[2]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref2′>. Cunningham draws sketches of animals,
dancers, and trees every day
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref3′>[3]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref3′>.
In the 2001 “Fluid Canvas,” the movement of his hand is transposed by a team of
digital artists and projected as the cosmic lines, shapes or dots that morph on
the backdrop blue. The fish outlines appear to have been penned by Cunningham
on the laptop. By association it is sky, water or space. Through the dancers’
energy and expression, the movement invites our projection of meaning, association
and coincidence.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>The selection of the two bands
Radiohead and Sigur Ross for “Split Sides” is not so different than
Cunningham’s previous choices. He collaborates with musicians working in
experimental ways and without a signature style. The dance combines two sets of
music, lighting plans, choreographed dances and costumes. Cunningham’s method
has always included chance. Announcing the options in a pre-performance
ceremony demystifies the process. The choreographic coherency of the world premiere
“Split Sides” proves that moderate doses of chance do not lead to chaos or
boredom. The company and collaborators are the human bridge that brings a group
of 16 lifeform figures from laptop to stage.
With the melodious new music of the stellar Icelandic bands, the banging that
still resounds in the head from “Fluid Canvas” begins to melt. “Split Sides” is
bright, and the game of seeing the dance follow it’s chosen-by-chance form
engages. For the first half of “Split,” a black vein pattern spreads over
pleasingly pumped up hues on the dancers’ unitards. Against a washed out
screensaver-like backdrop, the dancers cavort in monosyllabic movements. Men,
especially, says Cunningham, move naturally in spurts
href="https://nyartsmagazine.net/new/#_ftn4">
class=MsoFootnoteReference>[4]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref4′>. Both the movement and sound in “Split
Sides” coincidentally seem mercifully cleaner. Anxious facial expressions
reveal the dancers’ musicality during sounds of rubbing, mosquitoes, bells, and
nursery furniture. Though they are not illustrating the music, they respond
improvisationally and expressively to it. The hit or miss combination of music
and choreographed movement does not, however, always result in a happy
accident.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>Segued seamlessly by Sigur Ross,
‘act’ two of “Split” is signaled by dancers filtering on stage in black and
white patterned unitards. X-ray-like blur patterns cover the dancing bodies but
banded patterns on the arms help to accentuate and differentiate the movement
proscribed for arms and torso. The screensaver switches to a vertical streaked
pattern of pink, blue, and white. Dancers begin with high jumps that look
inanimate and the monosyllabic movements that look jerky like the movements of
the lifeform figures Cunningham works with. “The computer uses straight lines
where the tradition is to arc…he liked that.
href="https://nyartsmagazine.net/new/#_ftn5">
class=MsoFootnoteReference>[5]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref5′>” Adagio phrases close with quick runs,
jumps, hops or turns, and even a handstand. Heads look down and up as much as
out toward the audience. Cunningham’s work with film and video documentation
over the years sparked the notion that the dancers do not necessarily have to
be a front in the dance. With the camera on the rehearsal floor, dancers did
not have to go on and off the stage, but just in and out of the camera’s view.
This caused him to question the whole idea of ‘front.’
Cunningham’s inclusive and experimental plan for this dance helped to provide
an engaging and perhaps more accessible dance program. It was a fortuitous
introduction for first-time Cunningham patrons. The documentation we have of
his early performances reveals a history of risk but also of a physicality that
may be missed in these recent works that are devised on a laptop. Nevertheless,
“Split Sides,” a facsimile of his dance oeuvre, thoroughly engages with the
dancers’ technical virtuosity. With movements invented on the computer, he has
managed to “short-circuit the mind’s natural choices that are sometimes
sentimental clich�s.
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref6′>[6]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftnref6′>”
With Cunningham’s hand so visibly in the dance, as it was on screen in “Fluid
Canvas,” and with his personal introduction to his chance process for “Split
Sides,” how much more intimate could we
get?
style=’mso-special-character:line-break’>
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn1′>
style=’font-size:8.0pt’>[1]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn1′> Merce
Cunningham, BAM dialogue, 10/18/03
style=’font-size:8.0pt’>[2]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn2′> Cunningham
dancer Carolyn Brown, interviewed after dialogue
style=’font-size:8.0pt’>[3]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn3′> “Merce
Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance” American Masters DVD, 2000.
style=’font-size:8.0pt’>[4]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn4′> Merce
Cunningham, ibid.
style=’font-size:8.0pt’>[5]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn5′> Dancer Alan
Gould, video presented by Thecia Sciphorst in BAM dialogue.
style=’font-size:8.0pt’>[6]
style=’mso-bookmark:_ftn6′> Joan Acocella,
ibid.
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