Friday, January 3, 2020

A 3D Documentary Account of Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham with early members of his dance company (courtesy of Larsen Associates)

Cunningham is an innovative approach by Alla Kovgan to documenting the artistic evolution of choreographer Merce Cunningham over the period from 1944 to 1972. To call this film a documentary would be to sell it short. One current description calls Cunningham a “3D cinematic experience,” reflecting Kovgan’s decision to capture contemporary performances of Cunningham’s dances using three-dimensional cameras.

1944 is a significant year. Cunningham’s first solo dance recital in New York took place on April 5, 1944. The program consisted of six dances, five of which were performed for the first time and all of which were performed to music by John Cage on a prepared piano. The concert was reviewed by Edwin Denby and appeared in the Herald Tribune the following morning. That review can be found in the Denby anthology Looking at the Dance.

Over the next three decades Cunningham the solo dancer gradually developed an ensemble that came to be known at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), an “aesthetic core” that gradually transformed into a “second generation” of dancers during the Seventies. Kovgan’s offering thus accounts for that first stage of the growth of the Cunningham repertoire. However, Cunningham himself remained active in pursuing new approaches to performance almost until the time of his death on July 26, 2009.

I was fortunate to get very close to that developmental process between the summer of 1968 and the fall of 1971. It began when MCDC spent a summer residency at the University of Colorado (UC) at Boulder. They had been scheduled to perform at the arts festival preceding the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City and had selected Boulder as the best venue to prepare for the demands of activity at a high altitude.

By happy accident my thesis advisor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had accepted a summer appointment in the Mathematics Department at UC Boulder and brought me along as his teaching assistant. By that time I had been writing about the dance for Boston After Dark for several years, and it did not take long for me to realized that MCDC was on campus. More interesting, however, was the bulletin board I saw almost as soon as I arrived with a sheet of paper announcing that Cage would be conducting a seminar on Music and Mushrooms for those willing to show up at a specific place at a specific time. I turned out to be half of the “student body” for that seminar.

As a result, however, I began to hang out with Cage and the other two musicians providing the accompaniment for Cunningham’s choreography, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma. Those were the days when all audio technology was analog, and suddenly I had this rich opportunity to sound out others about software tools I have been developing and trying to put to good use. Because many of Mumma’s compositions were based on discrete “state machine” architecture, we had lots of paths to explore through our conversations.

At the same time I secured a position with the campus newspaper, the Colorado Daily, to write accounts of both the MCDC performances and concerts given by Cage, Tudor, and Mumma. My knowledge of category theory may not have advanced very far that summer, but I had my first serious experiences in finding the right descriptive language for reporting about Cunningham’s choreography and the unorthodox sounds that accompanied those dances. Those skills continued to grow as I seized every opportunity to attend and document an MCDC performance.

In January of 1970, MIT launched its “Independent Activities Period.” This involved a month-long hiatus during which classes were suspended and all students could pursue any particular goal that was of interest. I went down to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and made arrangements to write about all of the MCDC concerts that took place during the January season. That “diary” was published by Ballet Review and subsequently anthologized by Richard Kostelanetz in a book entitled Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time.

All this amounts to a somewhat longwinded explanation for why Kovgan’s Cunningham was a profoundly moving trip down memory lane for me. There is just too much subjectivity in my personal history with MCDC for me to have viewed Kovgan’s work objectively. Nevertheless, trying to be as detached as possible, I would say that I was more than a little impressed by how many bases she covered in accounting for those years between 1944 and 1972.

Mind you, I could not avoid some skepticism about her decision to give her subject matter a 3D treatment. However, I remembered that MCDC performances on stages such as that of the Brooklyn Academy of Music were only a part of Cunningham’s innovative approaches to performance. As the repertoire grew, the company would often supplement stage performances with “Event” pieces held at other venues, such as museums. (UC Boulder hosted a “Gymnasium Event.”) These amounted to excerpts from the repertoire, sometimes performed simultaneously rather than sequentially and usually planned out by chance operations. The musicians took a similar chance-based approach to providing accompaniment for the dancers.

Much of Kovgan’s 3D filming can be said to provide a latter-day riff on those events. Her technique could situate the dancers in settings that had never been conceived in Events during Cunningham’s lifetime. These tended to be large-scale spaces, such as a public courtyard or even a forest. Thus Kovgan, who had not yet been born during the period when Cunningham was so prodigiously creative, homed in on a contemporary perspective on the extensive diversity of approaches that he would take to performance.

One of Cunningham’s mottos was, “Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.” To some extent this applies to Kovgan’s final results. There is often a certain level of overload in the 3D sequences that evokes a sigh of relief when the content turns to old black-and-white footage of those early MCDC dancers. Also, there is a reconstruction of “Rainforest” in which there are just too damned many of Andy Warhol’s aluminized mylar pillows. The “If the Dancer Dances” documentary that follows the reconstruction of “Rainforest” for the Stephen Petronio Company is far preferable in accounting for both the flesh and the spirit of this particular dance.

I raise this comparison because Petronio was assisted by MCDC veterans in realizing that reconstruction. In other words he was working with a direct link to the past. Kovgan, on the other hand, was born in 1973, the year after the span of time she was examining. In watching her film it was often difficult to identify what links, if any, she had established and how she utilized those links; but how many of those links remain? Watching Cunningham touched a lot of nostalgic nerves, but it also reminded me of how few people from those exciting decades are still with us.

No comments: