History Repeats Itself … with Beneficial Results

This afternoon ODC’s B.Way Theater hosted the first of three performances of with, a one-hour duo created jointly by dancer Jung YoungDoo and pianist Jarosław Kapuściński. The piece amounted to a “conversation” between a composer and a choreographer. Both of the performers had opportunities to give a solo presentation. However, when they were performing at the same time, the impression was less one of a duet (at least in the classical sense of the word) than it was the unfolding of a relationship between the two performers. Kapuściński elaborated on the nature of that relationship as “one that draws on our friendship and mutual appreciation.”

Given my own background in relationships between music and dance, it was very difficult for me to avoid reflecting on the first performance given by dancer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage in New York. This took place on April 5, 1944, which is a little more than two years before I was born. However, due to my voracious interest in the work of both Cunningham and Cage, I have long relished reading the review of that performance that Edwin Denby wrote for the New York Herald Tribune. Mind you, Cage was playing a prepared piano for this occasion, dealing more with a rhetoric of percussive rhythms than with thematic content.

Kapuściński, on the other hand, was clearly focused on different approaches to the presentation of thematic material, whether it involved a clear distinction of melody and accompaniment or phrases that signified through sonority rather than melody and/or harmony. Nevertheless, I was profoundly struck when I encountered Jung asserting: “Sometimes music is the environment for dance, and dance is the environment for music. I wonder whether it’s possible for one whole composition of both music and dance to exist as a single entity.” That focus on the concept of “environment” clearly established that Jung and Kapuściński were dealing with a worldview that may have given a nod or two to Cunningham and Cage but had established its own set of aesthetic ground rules.

More often than not, we tend to associate solo performances of both dance and music as abstractions based on foundations of technical skill. What makes with interesting is ability to go beyond those abstractions without befuddling the audience. This is where Kapuściński’s emphasis on “friendship and mutual appreciation” comes into the picture. with transcends the usual foundations of the objective and subjective worlds and obliges the listener/viewer to advance into the social world, not a world in which large masses of individuals follow the guidance of a choreographer or a conductor but a world founded upon interpersonal relationships, which then reveal themselves through acts of performance.