Merce Cunningham at Annenberg

Merce, the cerebral choreographer:
Joy to the mind (if not the eye)

JIM RUTTER

In an economy where many Americans sit at desks for 40 years of their lives, only those who engage in some type of athletic or physical pursuit retain the knowledge that they live in bodies—their primary experience of the world filtered through the lens of conscious thought. Strangely enough, I could say something similar about Merce Cunningham’s choreography, at least as represented by the two pieces performed by his company at the Annenberg.

Unlike his polar opposite in George Balanchine—who once described the goal of his choreography as “trying to make the music visible"— Cunningham works independently of a composer. Seated alone in a room— at a computer, no less (using a program called DanceForms)— he composes works that convey no sense of scenes or theme, no story, just a calculated sense of logic designed to produce pure movement.

In Biped, the timed movement only rarely intersected the grating sound of pieces of glass rubbed together in composer Gavin Bryars’s score, resulting in a complete disruption of emotion from movement and posture, save for the dancers’ physical grace, here reduced to an almost machine-like elegance of form.

A mathematician’s calculated expression

And if collective dance evolved from the feeling of a trance-like consciousness generated by musically-driven communal movement—often still seen in corps dance pieces in ballets like Giselle, Swan Lake, and Dracula—then Cunningham’s work feels even more cerebral in comparison. Even when his dancers move together in choreographed turns, Biped feels more like a well-articulated psychosis, a mathematician’s cold and calculated expression of meaning in human movement.

Behind a scrim, the dancers moved against a backdrop of laser lights and illuminated floor tiles, creating the feeling of being trapped in a flowing, matrix-like reality of horizontal beams of light and screen-saver like images. Bryars’s industrial synth music, combined with enormous skeletal projections of computer-programmed dancers, increased the sense of the dance as computer program, yielding harmonious images of the future in which sleekly costumed, hyper-athletic bodies move in linear, timed fashion, each occasionally mimicking the movements of another, yet separated, lonely, like workers who may be acting in unison while separated by cubicles and glass.

Cunningham’s series of potent images— when one dancer is left alone on the stage, her face still betrays a hint of dread or disillusionment— create an almost hypnotic effect, and it’s enough to stir remnants of emotions almost drained away by the industrial feel of this piece. However cerebral, Biped presents a brave, fascinating new world of dance indeed.

With a little help from my iPod

Ever adept at incorporating technological innovation, Cunningham provided the evening’s most conceptually engaging performance in his 2006 work, eyeSpace. During intermission, the Annenberg’s staff encouraged the audience to “rent” iPod shuffles for the second act, where the device’s random shuffling effect would generate individual playlists of composer Mikel Rouse’s music during the performance.

Like a director who says, “Why force them to experience only one thing, and all of them the same thing?” the “eye” in eyeSpace stood here for the individual’s sole point of auditory experience that merged with the collective visual phenomenon shared by everyone else in the audience.

In achieving such a unique effect, Cunningham’s piece raised interesting ontological questions about the nature of art, and the artistic experience, all covered before by the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in his seminal Art As Experience. When confronted with a new work of art, Dewey contended, each person’s response (rational as well as emotional) and the degree to which he values the artwork in question, depends on how well his existing cache of beliefs and experience can integrate (or if not, reject) any new work. Thus for Dewey and the masses of American educators he influenced, the value of arts education plays an important role in expanding a student’s sense of possible future cultural enrichment.

Removing the collective audience experience

While eyeSpace may represent a perfect expression of Dewey’s theory, Cunningham’s innovative style took these ideas one step further, adding another layer of individual difference— in the music— to his choreography’s total experience. During the course of the piece, I not only wound up shifting back and forth from the preprogrammed iPods and the overall soundscape played faintly through speakers, but also, if I found a song I liked, I’d listen to that “movement” again and again. The dance became all the more ephemeral as a result.

And as for collective experience as an integral part of any theater event? The random nature of the iPod shuffle’s playing reduced the chances of the entire audience all having the same musical experience to almost nil (there are three million possible permutations). Yet a collective experience of Cunningham’s work remains possible— especially when the effect of 2,000 iPods playing at once meant that I could hear other people’s music playing around me, blending their artistic experience with mine.

Again, it’s all cerebral, like knowing at an amusement park that you’re entering a haunted house. Sure, you’re scared, but it’s a second-order type of terror. The same applies to what Cunningham makes the audience feel with this concept— assuming, of course, that “he” “makes” “us” “feel” anything at all.

Who needs dance? Who needs movement?

While the collective visual aspect remained, I found myself focused more on the iPod music, making the dance so much more and less important as a result. Why, in this experiment, have a fixed point of reference? Why have any movement at all?

The fact that I was asking these questions— during the performance, enhancing my artistic experience as a result—rendered Cunningham’s work even more cerebral: an art-as-sophistication, or even art as sophistry type of choreography.

But I’m one of those people who enjoy art on a purely intellectual level. As Dewey would put it, I brought all the baggage of my own psychology and experience to the Annenberg on Thursday. Consequently, I loved it. For me, the conceptual experience of Cunningham’s eyeSpace—if not the piece itself— turned the sophisticated exploration of a concept into an artistic triumph.