The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, as has become widely known, does not dance to music, nor does the music play for the dancers. Both exist in the same time frame, but they're created separately, as are lighting and decor. When movements or sounds will occur are determined randomly, using chance methods that go back to the earliest collaborations between Cunningham and John Cage.
Cage's philosophies remain a singular influence, nowhere more so than for composers who work with the company, where Cunningham, 88, is still in charge, still making dances. In fact, say company representatives, that's why he'll be staying in New York during the company's engagement this weekend at Stanford University.
A scene from eyeSpace
The Stanford Lively Arts program offers two different versions, one on Friday night and the other on Saturday night, of a dance titled eyeSpace: two composers, two orderings of chance, and the intriguing prospect of even more than the wide range of possibilities Cunningham's dances normally encompass. (The bill also includes Crises and CRWDSPCR on Friday, and BIPED on Saturday.)
Shuffle and Dance
When eyeSpace (2006) is performed Friday at Memorial Auditorium, the audience will have iPods, either their own or loaned by the company, on which they can hear composer Mikel Rouse's International Cloud Atlas. (For those who are iPod- or risk-averse, Rouse, working with Merce Cunningham Dance Company Music Coordinator Stephan Moore, also made a composition for the house speakers.)
Now the best part: The audience will be instructed to press "shuffle." So in addition to the randomness of the chance operations already governing the piece, the music's sequencing will be randomly ordered electronically, and each person will hear a different accompaniment to the dance.
Rouse, born in the late 1950s, says his work has been influenced by jazz and rock and roll, as well as John Cage, artist and Cunningham/Cage associate Robert Rauschenberg, and the complex structures of classical music. "I'm very interested in finding ways to take my love of structure and put it into vernacular or popular music," Rouse said from New York.
EyeSpace is "the Cage/Cunningham aesthetic on steroids," Rouse says. "The score for International Cloud Atlas is comprised of 10 pieces, so basically there are more than 3 million possible permutations. The chance that the person sitting next to you will have a completely different mood and feeling with their iPod is pretty great."
Composer Mikel Rouse
Photo by Susan San Giovanni
Most members of the audience "love it," he says. "Others are really disconcerted. You're used to being aware of what's going on around you." Still, many people who already walk around a noisy city plugged into their iPods, even to the point of potentially fatal distraction, find the experience similarly liberating. People listening on the iPods have "a private and public experience at the same time," says Rouse. "It's high art, but at the same time it's a lot of fun. It's not a form that hits you over the head and says you can't enjoy it."
And then there's the geek factor: "It sort of acknowledges where we are as a society," Rouse says. Using a special code, ticket holders can download the score from iTunes, or from the Cunningham Web site, onto their iPods. "It's a completely modern take on music and dance," he adds. "It makes the audience a larger participant than ever before."
Rouse has a unique affinity for this kind of dance performance, being married to Cunningham dancer Lisa Boudreau. This does, he confesses, allow him to cheat while composing, by peeking at a dancer: "I get to say, 'Do something here in the living room.' " Rouse also employs a dance first: Each member of the company, 14 in all, speak, sing, or play an instrument. "Nobody asked them before," says Rouse. "They're a very talented group of people, with interests beyond modern dance."
Robert Swinston, Cunningham's assistant and a dancer in the company since 1980, contributed percussion. Swinston, who's in charge in Cunningham's absence (Cunningham, he reports, remains "incredibly astute and totally involved in everything"), points out that sometimes, the dancers are so busy dancing they can't really hear the music. During
eyeSpace, though, dancers are aware that members of the audience are using their iPods in different ways — "Some take them off, and some use shuffle" — and the dancers can also hear the soundscape that accompanies the piece sans iPod.
The Music of Everyday Life
EyeSpace's iPod version on Friday is 20 minutes long. The Saturday night version, with a live score without iPods titled Jitterbug by Annea Lockwood, is 40 minutes long and equally governed by chance, just chance of a different order. The order, we might say, is naturalistic.
Composer Annea Lockwood
Lockwood, from New Zealand, was studying classical music in London in 1963 when she first met Takehisa Kosugi, Merce Cunningham's music director. She also performed works by John Cage in London in 1972, early in the electronic-music era.
Hearing how Lockwood made Jitterbug is like listening to a master quilt maker describing her choices of materials and colors. "There are two layers. The electro-acoustic layer, in six channels, consists of recordings of aquatic insects I made with an underwater microphone in Montana, back in the summer of 2006." She also used underwater recording sounds from David Tudor, David Dunn, and Maggi Payne, who has "a very good hydrophone," she said from Westchester County, N.Y., where she lives near the Hudson River.
The underwater sounds are mixed with "gong resonances," she says, from Gustavo Aguilar, as well as tam-tam sounds from William Winant. In electronic music, she says, "There's a huge, unending range of sounds available, and they're sitting in my hand. They're right there to move and shape, as opposed to working initially through aural imagination." As for natural sounds, they have ''complex interior rhythms. It's like caving, listening further and further into the sound. The unpredictability is wonderful."
For Jitterbug's second layer, Lockwood brought back from Montana layered sedimentary rocks in blues and reds, while another friend, Gwen Deely, took photos of the surfaces of the stones. She gave the photos to Takehisa Kosugi and John King to translate the shapes and color gradations into pitch, timbre, and rhythm changes. Even a diagonal crack in one of the rocks translates into an audible change.
In effect, the musicians read the rocks — Saturday night the interpreters will be King and electronic-music virtuoso David Behrman instead of Kosugi. "They get to choose what rock they're going to play, and the order," Lockwood says. "They have to read the rocks from bottom to top and from right to left, in honor of Kosugi being Japanese," she says, not very solemnly.
"It's a lot of fun listening to them doing it," she continues. "They're amazing musicians, and every once in a while they go wild. Kosugi plays the rock from time to time. He brings tiny objects to play the rock with, like empty plastic hotel shampoo bottles, rocks, stones, shards of glass. And John King does really amazing things with electric guitar."
EyeSpace, Lockwood says, has "a lovely slow section and a wonderful opening. I particularly like the way Cunningham works, so that music and dance coexist rather than being interrelated, so that when there's any coincidence of pacing, it's delicious."
A Found Soundscape
In addition to the separate scores on the two evenings, there's a third element of sound, from Stephan Moore, the Cunningham company's music coordinator. Wherever the company goes — and the dance has been performed in Paris; Los Angeles; Melbourne; New York; Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Burlington, Vt. — "I make a set of field recordings [of] ambient sounds," says Moore, an engineer, sound designer, and also a composer in his own right. "I try to [record] in places where I see people wearing iPods. And I'll be improvising an ambient soundscape, for people in the audience to have a sense that there's sonically something happening in the room."
"I can sort of choose where the sounds will be popping up," Moore says. "I've written a piece of software that lets me decide where they should go. The Cunningham company has a real tradition of working with hand-built instruments."
The other element of chance, of course, involves the dancers. "We're in the pit and we're not looking [up]," Moore says. "There's no speakers onstage for them to hear. They have their own breathing and footfalls to listen to, to keep their timing right."
He finds this absence of involvement with the dance both liberating and frustrating. He adds that when he isn't playing, if he watches the dancers and the musicians, "What they're doing there looks so perfectly synchronized," he says. "I know that's because my mind wants it to be that way."
"What surprises me," adds Moore, "is that more choreographers and composers haven't built on this idea of independence of the elements, because it is so successful and surprising."
Janice Berman, SFCV’s senior dance critic, has been a dance writer and reviewer since 1978, beginning at Newsday and New York Newsday. She has written on dance for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Ballet Review, and Dance Magazine, where she was editor-in-chief.
