Total ImMERCEsion

Predictably, the two versions of Merce Cunningham's eyeSpace seen on consecutive nights of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's engagement at Stanford University last weekend, presented by Stanford Lively Arts, looked so different from each other as to be separate creations. What was less predictable was the difference in their affect, their effect. One of the things, it seems, about Cunningham dance is that for all its still-fresh unorthodoxy — this, after 54 years of the company's existence — it has things to teach us about how we see all dance, all art. Friday night's eyeSpace, 20 minutes long, came with an iPod Shuffle for each member of the audience, loaded with 10 songs composed by Mikel Rouse and shuffled randomly. The audience was told to press "play." They could listen to that or to an ambient sound score — noises captured by Stephan Moore and Rouse from stops on the company's tour, including Stanford (train sounds were major, as was children's laughter and noises heard in nature) — that was piped into six speakers of Memorial Auditorium.

And there were a dozen dancers in blue leotards in front of a tasty scrim of blues, greens, and reds, shimmering against each other to suggest growing shoots and graphic exclamation points. Mark Lancaster did the costumes and decor. As always, the dance was made separately from the costumes and set, and so was the music. And as always, the net effect of these creations, all on display to the eyes and ears in the same place, at the same time, was never one impression, but a succession of them.

Shuffle, Squared

In my headset, Mikel Rouse's music began with a fuzzy hum, then moved on to a banjo-esque song, then to suggestions of whines and beeps, as well as some rhythmic beats. Someone intoned over and over, "Gaza Strip mall, looka who's shoppin.' '' All the dancers contributed their own sounds, vocal, instrumental, or percussion. At no point did the music seem to end or begin, so the 10 songs emerged as one. It did not matter, then, whether my iPod, or yours, was on shuffle. That was simply perhaps the clearest manifestation yet of what always happens during a Merce Cunningham dance concert. Your mind is on shuffle, capturing what it and you will, and creating, from your own surround, your own impulses, a unique experience, a unique appreciation of the unfolding kaleidoscope of sight, sound, and movement. The same thing happens to us all when we see any work of art. We inform it as it informs us. It's just that Cunningham's work provides a more direct entry into that nigh-indescribable (I'm trying, I'm trying!) experience. As for the dancing: so many moves, antic and mellow. So many acute balances, held for extraordinary lengths of time. This looks like a tall crop of dancers and a strong one, with willowy, powerful extremities, used to maximum effect in fugal, fantastic combinations with accretive power. Cunningham dance looks somewhat angular, as if it were shaped on a computer screen. And it was. The choreographer's use of Life Forms software, with its pose-able figures, lets him work even when the dancers are away. Onstage, the slightly mechanistic style underlying even closely partnered moves seems a match for the sheer abstraction of sound and surround. The curtain drops on moving figures, and you want them back. The next night's eyeSpace was 40 minutes long, for 13 dancers, with a score, Jitterbug, by Annea Lockwood, played in the pit by John King, David Behrman, and Stephan Moore. Lockwood's composition was made from recordings of aquatic bugs in Montana, plus an electronic score based on images of rock layers from the same area, as well as some of the rocks themselves, which may be played or struck by various materials, such as plastic bottles or pieces of glass. The bugs chirruped and burbled peaceably — at least I think they were the bugs — and the rocks awaited their various fates. At one point we heard what sounded like a metal jar lid clattering circularly on a metal surface. The sound was — jarring. Daniel Arsham's decor included glowing, silvery unitards for the dancers and, on the backdrop, a graphic of a theater, inclined at a disconcerting angle. Arsham's set was titled "Ode/Odeon," and, accentuated by Josh Johnson's lighting, it offered such a representational, emotionally loaded image — a theater, behind dancers in a theater? — that it seemed to make an impact on the dancing and the music. But having been created separately, it was yet another example of what our heads, going off on their own set of images, memories, and expectations, do to us. The choreography, reordered, bore but one image that I could recollect from the previous night: a dancer seating herself on the arms of her partner. The dancing, perhaps because of the ambient glow, looked more sustained and more balletic, with distinct rondes des jambes and arabesques declaring themselves here and there within the steady unfoldings and unassuming majesty of the dancers, who, in part because of the generally bucolic nature of Lockwood's sumptuous musical palette, began to seem like deer, offering us a glimpse of a kind of sylvan privacy. This, despite that structural backdrop. It's what's alluring about Cunningham performances: the strange yet interesting disconnect, where nothing is ever the same as before. And that, among other glories, is reason to go. The bill at Stanford included, on Friday, the revived 1960 Crises, with Holley Farmer, of the amazingly centered balances — she held one foot out as her arms rippled, straight out from the shoulder end to end — and Rashaun Mitchell as her supple partner, as well as fine work from Jennifer Goggans, Julie Cunningham, and Andrea Weber. The music was Conlon Nancarrow's Rhythm Studies for Player Piano #1, 2a, unknown, #4, #5, #6, #7. Your reviewer had never heard this Nancarrow before. The escalating vigor, warmth, and happiness of what sounded like a player piano on Zoloft was seemingly made — though of course not made at all — for the matchless energy of Cunningham's choreography and the dancers' execution. Saturday night's show included Cunningham's 1999 BIPED, juxtaposed with a brilliantly feverish score by Gavin Bryars, played by Loren Dempster, John King, and David Behrman. The electronic music also includes acoustic work, such as Bryars' trademark country-style plucked strings, and as we hear them we see the dancers whirling as if on an antic carousel. The decor, by Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser, includes motion-capture animation, in which dancers are recorded as they move and then their outlines are projected above the actual dancers. Seeing these gigantic neon figures and the smaller yet mighty company of 13 gives a moving, in both senses of the word, glimpse of the depths of the company's range and artistry.