Today, thanks to The New York Times, I discovered “Dance Capsules,” created by the Cunningham Dance Foundation before it closed to preserve 86 key works by Merce Cunningham, documenting the repertoire of his Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC). That archive is now maintained on the Web site of the Merce Cunningham Trust. Readers may recall that I was fortunate enough to devote considerable time between the summer of 1968 and the fall of 1971 observing and writing about Cunningham and many of the dances he created.
However, there was one dance I never had a chance to view that had piqued my curiosity. “Summerspace” was first performed on August 17, 1959 during the annual American Dance Festival held at Connecticut College in New London. This particular dance attracted my attention because, to my knowledge, it was the only one that was subsequently taught to the members of the New York City Ballet, given its first performance in the New York State Theater on April 14, 1966. Furthermore, because I had many opportunities to attend performances of “Winterbranch” (first performed by MCDC at the New York State Theater on March 4, 1965), I was curious about whether the two dances complemented each other.
After my first encounter with “Summerspace,” I am inclined to argue that they do. The common foundation involves the relationship between the space in which the dancers are performing and the extent to which their performances are visible. “Winterbranch” makes its case boldly, if not provocatively. Not only is lighting minimal, but the lighting cues themselves are determined prior to each performance by chance methods. This means that the placement of the lights has little to do with the positions of the dancers and, more often than not, are at cross-purposes with the dancers placement and trajectories.
Adrian Danchig-Waring dancing Merce Cunningham’s “Summerspace” (photograph by Erin Baiano, from a Facebook post by DancEnthusiast on October 24, 2019)
“Summerspace” also provides an environment that can obscure the dancers, but in a much more subtle way. Robert Rauschenberg provided the dancers with costumes, whose designs were almost identical to the set curtain behind them. Thus, there are many situations in which, when a dancer is not moving, (s)he can almost be seen to “melt” into the background. One result is that, while “Winterbranch” cedes to chance any opportunity to see a dancer in motion, there are times in “Summerspace” when a dancer can only be perceived when (s)he is in motion!
There is another interesting factor that only arises when one is watching “Summerspace” through a digital medium. From a technical point of view, the set curtain is a very “high bandwidth” object. What this means is that the digitization must process a large number of dark dots spread out across a background of patches of color, none of which have well-defined boundaries. As a result, any movement of the camera, whether to follow a dancer across the stage or to zoom closer or further from that dancer, involves a considerable amount of high-resolution computation. Indeed, the computation is so massive that the background visibly blurs while the processing is taking place, adding another dimension of foreground-background relationship to that experienced when watching the performance in a theater.
The performance captured for this “documentation” of “Summerspace” took place in 2001. What one sees in the performance video, on the other hand, was not made by Charles Atlas until 2008. Therefore, it would not surprise me if Atlas appreciated the extent to which high bandwidth could be problematic. I would then suggest that he chose to invoke a motto that was very familiar in the computer laboratory where I created the software that would form the foundation for my doctoral thesis. That motto was: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” Just as John Cage was frequently more interested in eccentricities in detail, rather than the “big picture,” Atlas may have decided to let the inability of technology to replicate what the eye could see emerge as a new feature, rather than a failure to reproduce the physical experience!
“Winterbranch,” on the other hand, creates an instance of too little bandwidth, rather than too much. As a result, I was not surprised to see that the Public Assets of the Dance Capsules site do not include a film/video document. Who wants to spend a quarter of an hour observing a performance taking place in so little light that the dancers are only seldom visible?
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