Watching a 3D Documentary on Television

Screenshot of a frame from Cunningham showing two contemporary dancers performing Cunningham’s “Summerspace” (from the IMDb Web page for the film)

This afternoon I used my HBO Max service to watch the 2019 documentary Cunningham. By way of disclaimer, I should note that, as a graduate student, I became “hooked” on the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) as the result of an “accident.” In the summer of 1969, I followed my doctoral thesis advisor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he spent the summer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I served as his teaching assistant, but my principal duty was to take notes for all of his lectures. This was a straightforward undertaking, but it left me with a lot of spare time.

Fortunately, on my first day of personal wandering, I discovered that John Cage was on the campus; and he had put up an announcement for those wishing to attend a “Music and Mushrooms” seminar. Cage, in turn, was the Music Director for MCDC, which was also on the Boulder campus. They were there in preparation for performing in Mexico City. They chose Boulder for its altitude, so they could get their lungs in shape for the higher altitude in Mexico.

Cage’s seminar turned out to be one of driving into the woods and then letting things happen. Since it was a dry summer, very few mushrooms were encountered. However, through Cage, I got to know the other musicians performing with MCDC, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma. I saw two complete (and different) programs performed that summer, and I was hooked. So much so that, when MIT declared January to be a “do whatever pleases you” month for all graduate students, I drove down to New York and watched a full Cunningham season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

I kept a day-by-day diary of every program that I saw. That then found its way into an article in Ballet Review (Volume iii, issue 3). None of this went down very well with my thesis advisor. However, I was “rescued” through the time I was spending at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where Marvin Minsky helped me find a way to write a doctoral dissertation that was as much about music as it was about parallel processing (an approach to digital computing which, at that time, was in it infancy).

All of these past experiences came back to me as I watch Cunningham. Even the way in which the film, directed by Alla Kovgan, was sequenced seemed to emerge as its own unique approach to parallel processing! Ironically, the documentary was originally created with 3D technology. While I never had the opportunity to see it that way, I knew enough about the “source material” that my mind could add the “third dimension” to just about everything I saw. Indeed, to be fair, Kovgan’s film used that third dimension relatively sparingly, since the lion’s share of the content involved archival footage, much of which filled me with more nostalgia than I anticipated.

I grant that, for those unfamiliar with the Cunningham choreography in the documentary, the “third dimension” would clarify Cunningham’s own “three dimensional” approach to the dances he created. The good news was that most of those dances were already burned into my memory, thanks to the many performances I was fortunate enough to attend. I just had to substitute the dancers I saw on television with those I remembered from the past performances I had attended and documented! Mind you, I would not pass up an opportunity to experience Kovgan’s 3D intentions; but I would not be surprised if that opportunity never arose!