Cunningham, Collage, and the Computer

Ten years ago, as he approached the age of seventy, Merce Cunningham began experimenting with a computer animation program called Life Forms, which represents the human body as a series of concentric circles. Seated at the computer, Cunningham can dictate—and simultaneously notate—a wide variety of choreographic variables (everything from the flexing of a joint to the height and/or length of a jump, the location of each dancer on stage, the transition from one phrase to the next, etc.). The computer screen, divided into squares like a checkerboard, becomes a “virtual stage” that can be electronically tilted or rotated so that the genderless, “wire-frame” Life Form figures can be viewed from any number of perspectives.

Figure 1.

Trackers (1990), Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Photo: Courtesy Johan Elbers.

Figure 2.

Polarity (1990), with Alan Good and Patricia Lent, Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Photo: Courtesy Jed Downhill.

Figure 3.

Groundlevel Overlay, Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Photo: Courtesy Marc Ginot.

Figure 4.

CRWDSPCR (1993), with Thomas Caley, Jenifer Weaver, Frédéric Gafner, Jean Freebury, Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Photo: Courtesy Lois Greenfield.

By the early 1990s Cunningham had became the first choreographer of international renown to utilize the computer as a choreographic tool. (So much for the widespread assumption that the digital revolution is a young person’s game.) The earliest dance Cunningham choreographed with the assistance of Life Forms was Trackers in 1991. Significantly, when Cunningham appeared on stage in this work, he did so with the assistance of a portable barre which also seemed to function as a geriatric “walker.”

The upright posture had always been central to Cunningham’s choreographic identity. But by 1991, severe arthritis had made it increasingly difficult for him to stand—let alone walk or dance—in an upright position for any extended period of time. As a result, the emotional tone of Trackers was simultaneously sad and heroic. It presented Merce Cunningham as a dancer/choreographer determined to remain vertical despite the debilitations of age. But Trackers also made it clear that Cunningham would not be able to continue indefinitely choreographing and teaching from the standing position that had constituted his starting point—his center of gravity—for the past fifty years. Thus it’s tempting to conclude that the Life Forms software became available at the very moment Cunningham most needed it; that is, Life Forms made it possible for Cunningham to choreograph from a seated, rather than a standing, position. True enough.

Still, it would be a mistake to assume that Cunningham’s increasing reliance on Life Forms as a choreographic tool was dictated primarily by anatomical necessity. It’s my contention that Cunningham would have been attracted to the idea of choreographing at the computer in any event, independent of considerations prompted by advanced age and advancing arthritis. Cunningham’s own words bear this out: in 1994, he wrote a short essay entitled, “Four Events That Have Led To Large Discoveries.” The four events, listed chronologically, are (a) the decision “to separate the music and the dance”; (b) the decision “to use chance operations in the choreography”; (c) “the work we have done with video and film”; and (d) “the use of a dance computer, Life Forms.” What I want to suggest is that the journey from (a) to (d) was all but inevitable, that each discovery laid the groundwork for it successor—and that all four events serve the common end of investigating and promoting the same world-view: that of collage.

Collage appeals to an age that has come to distrust claims of “unity” and fixed boundaries. The novelist and short story writer Donald Barthelme once declared, “Fragments are the only forms I trust.” Significantly, it was also Barthelme who made the following claim on behalf of collage: “The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the 20th Century in all media.” The French word, collage, adapted from the verb coller, translates as...