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Cunningham and Duehamp In giving up control (via chance techniques) over such elements as timing, spacing, and sequencing, Cunningham needed to assert even more careful control in a different direction over his dancers. For one thing, ifthe dancers were not carefully coordinated, the varying speeds and complicated movement patterns might lead to accidents. For another, strict direction was necessary since the dancers could not rely on musical phrasing or other conventional methods to synchronize their movements. In other words, the creator's vast freedom in handling his compositional materials led to a richness of content but, simultaneously, to a tightening ofthe reins over his performers. By contrast, improvisation allows for the spontaneity that was prized by the younger generation, but only through totally conscious control, residing anarchically in each individual performer- the exact opposite of the surrender to fate implied by using chance techniques. It also allows for movement contentand performance style beyond any gamut ofthe choreographer 's imagination. Improvisation democratizes the choreographic procedure by relocating it in the performers. But it also creates the risk of a "failed" performance. Hence the conflict in Story goes much deeper than a power play in a dance company; it is the friction between two irreconcilable ways of making artistic choices.2o 11 Cunningham and Duchamp W"dh Noel Carroll Marcel Duchamp has suffered the fate ofcertain great artists: he has become an adjective, a handy category for puzzling, verbally playful, inaccessible, and "intellectual" painters, sculptors, composers, and performers . But applying the concept "Duchampian" on the basis of characteristics like puzzlement, inaccessibility, and word wit often seems too broad to be informative. One must exercise great care in examining the Ballet Review ll/2 (Summer 1983). 109 110 The hro-Allerican Avant-Garde relation ofDuchamp to current artists. Thus our first task is to consider not only the analogies that can be drawn between Merce Cunningham and Duchamp, but the disanalogies as well. One very general area of congruence between the two is signaled by our willingness to attribute certain of the same qualities - for example, "intelligence" - to the oeuvres of both. In Duchamp, this "intelligence" derives from his spinning paradoxes, explorations of "the limit" of the concept of art, and hermeticism. In Cunningham, on the other hand, "intelligence" is a quality ofthe movements and bodies that his choreography comprises. We don't paraphrase his dances into propositions about the nature ofart, as we do Duchamp's ready-mades, nor do we take them to be alchemical allegories, as many do regarding The Large Glass. Rather, "intelligence" pertains to the movement's most significant expressive quality in Cunningham's dance. In opposition to the technique of the Graham style (from which he emerged), Cunningham's movement is light. It is directionally flexible and often rapier fast, covering space both quickly and hyperarticulately. At the same time, it is characterized by what followers of Laban call bound flow; the energy is liquid and resilient inside the dancer, but it stops at the boundary of the body. It is strictly defined and controlled. It does not rush vectorially or spill into the surrounding space. It has an air ofexactitude and precision. In turn, these formal bodily properties -lightness, elasticity, speed, and precision - suggest a particular description of the mind as an agile, cool, lucid, analytic intelligence of the sort once referred to as Gallic or Cartesian, but also appropriate as an ideal ofpost-World War II America. Whereas the image of human thought in Graham was heavy, organic, brooding, and altogether nineteenth century, in Cunningham it is permutational , correlational, strategic, exact, rarefied, and airy. This is not to say that Cunningham presents a pantomime of the mind, but that he presents the body as intelligent in a specifically contemporary way. Indeed, the idea of bodily intelligence itself is contemporary, while the mode of that intelligence in Cunningham's work is clearly analogous to Duchamp's preferred style of thought. Another increment of "intelligence" in Cunningham's work is a quality of clarity. Most often, this amounts to a principle of separabilitythat is, each element in a dance has its own autonomy and must be apprehended in isolation from the other elements of the spectacle. This is most evident in Cunningham's relation to his composers, most notably John Cage. Music and dance are presented as disjunct, unsynchronized events, each comprehended in its own right. They are not fused in a single Gesamtkunstwerk. This division of music and movement distinguishes Cunningham from George Balanchi~e, a...

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