At the beginning of a performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the acclaimed choreographer walks onstage and tosses a pair of dice to determine what music the audience will hear. He rolls them again and again to decide on the costumes, backdrop, lighting and sequence of dance segments for the evening’s program.
It’s hard to think of another major 20th-century artist—except for the company’s former music director, the late John Cage—who has made uncertainty, or what Cunningham calls “indeterminacy,” so central to the creative process. His “chance procedures” and his collaboration with other iconoclastic luminaries such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Buckminster Fuller earned Cunningham a reputation as one of the most daring, influential figures in American arts. He has also worked widely in film and video and routinely employs computer software in his choreography.
This year, Stanford Lively Arts is orchestrating an unusual campuswide project focused on Cunningham’s ideas and artistic expression. Director Lois Wagner describes Encounter: Merce as “the first collaborative, multidisciplinary exploration through the arts at Stanford.” Numerous academic departments signed up to offer courses and stage interdisciplinary performances based on the choreographer’s principles. The Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Humanities Center and Lane Medical Library are holding complementary exhibits, film screenings and other activities.
The two-quarter undertaking started in September and moves into high gear in early March, when the 85-year-old Cunningham arrives for a weeklong residency that includes two performances by his celebrated dance company and several other public events from March 8 to 12. His troupe will perform Split Sides, a new work commissioned jointly by Lively Arts, the Paris Opera and the U.K.’s Dance Umbrella, with experimental scores by rock bands Radiohead and Sigur Rós. On March 12, a Presidential Lecture features Cunningham in conversation with John Rockwell, arts and leisure editor of the New York Times.
Nothing illustrates Cunningham’s multifaceted appeal—and the goal of this project—better than Ortho 222: Anatomy of Movement, an interdisciplinary course geared to students in biological sciences, medicine, mechanical engineering, computer science, anthropology, and performing and visual arts. One topic option for the course’s required project this winter quarter is “What is the Essence of Merce Cunningham?” Admittedly, the syllabus says, his work defies description because “movement is unchained from music, particular dance phrases are chosen by the laws of chance, and boundaries of time and space are continually challenged.” That said, students are expected to “objectify” his style, compared to traditional dance, in scientific terms “using 3-d kinematic and kinetic analysis.”
As expected, dance and music faculty eagerly found ways to intertwine their course offerings with the Merce project. Dance lecturer Diane Frank, a former instructor with Cunningham’s studio in New York, is teaching an intermediate/advanced class in Cunningham-based technique. “The students rehearse without music and learn to put movements together that don’t usually follow one another,” Frank says. “The class will be supplemented by some chance procedures experiences, which give the dancers the opportunity to assemble work in a fresh way.”
In music, Mark Applebaum is teaching a freshman seminar on John Cage and an undergraduate composition seminar in which students use chance procedures. Chris Chafe, director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), taught a Fundamentals of Composing class last quarter, where students created electronic versions of a John Cage composition written for instruments. “This has been a galvanizing project for the students. Some of them will hear their work in concert,” he says.
Chafe refers to a happening to be hosted by the center, which brings artists, scientists and technologists together to investigate scientific and technological questions and create technology-based art. Audience members will wander among several geodesic-dome tents while listening to the students’ compositions. “In the true collaborative tradition of CCRMA, we’re getting guidance from the [Cunningham] troupe and the John Cage trust. Some things will be completely spontaneous and some we will have worked out in advance,” Chafe says. “The boundaries are blurred between the audience and the performers. The usual roles change, and there’s more chance interaction.”
In another cooperative effort, three alumni choreographers are each creating 8- to 10-minute dances using chance procedures without regard to musical accompaniment, while music students are composing pieces of the same length using different chance procedures. At a performance titled Music and Dance by Chance, the resulting works will be layered together for the first time. Cunningham calls it “cohabitation.”
“Things are not coordinated,” Applebaum explains, “they cohabit in a performance. You’ll have some moments of linear connection, where it feels like the performance was created by one mind. But most of the time, you’ll have this very exciting coexistence of disparate things, and the audience tries to navigate and figure out the juxtaposition.” The idea of an audience made up of active participants who process the elements they’re presented with is key to understanding Cunningham’s process, he adds.
Yet another “cohabitation” features the Stanford Improvisational Collective musicians and Cunningham’s company. After a 30-minute musical overture of John Dorn’s “Cobra,” the dancers will perform as Applebaum plays the mouseketier, an original electroacoustic sound-sculpture made of junk, hardware and found objects. He plays it with chopsticks, violin bows, windup toys and his hands. He’ll be joined by students creating short “sound events” in the spirit of John Cage.
To be a part of a Cunningham-inspired collaboration, Frank observes, is to push boundaries, leaving results open to surprises as they unfold. “It’s a very heightened, potent thing—wonderful for young dancers and musicians to experience.”
Jeffrey Schnapp is director of the Stanford Humanities Lab, which funds large-scale research projects demonstrating a “new kind of convergence between the digital and the humanities disciplines.” He sees SHL ’s participation in the Cunningham events as an example of synchronicity: researchers studying Buckminster Fuller (whose massive archive rests at Stanford) can share their findings, and learn more about Fuller through Cunningham. The two taught at Black Mountain College’s summer institute in the 1940s; SHL will host a panel discussion about the progressive art school with Cunningham participating.
Schnapp says the Cunningham project dovetails with what is already taking place on campus. “Most universities are rather conservative. Stanford is one of the more fluid university environments, open to change and innovation. It’s congenial to interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration.”
Chafe agrees. “From the planning to the process itself, a project like this that takes us out of the corners of our campus and brings us together is phenomenal.”
LINDA WEBER is a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco.
