Cunningham interview

[Alexandra]

I've copied this over from Links for discussion. I can't imagine ANYONE here who has the SLIGHTEST interest in Cunningham, of course.....

Not about ballet, but in the Telegraph Ismene Brown visits with Merce Cunningham and poses questions from eight British choreographers.

Burrows and Clark both attacked Cunningham's belief in chance decisions. He had said that there is no thinking in his choreography, said Clark – how could choreography exist without thought?

"I think my saying that is a mistake," said Cunningham, "because there is thinking, but it's not about what the dancing refers to. It's about looking at a movement and not trying to add something, to let it be what it is – and to find that does take thinking."

I said that to me his dances look more like wildlife than humans – does he mistrust human logic? His voice rose:

"There was certainly some kind of logic in our present government going to war with Iraq, but what kind of logic, and what kind of use has it been?"

[sandik]

I just finished printing this out so I could keep it around.

Cunningham has been making dances for so long, I think that sometimes it's easy to forget exactly how radical his processes still are. Even today, there are few choreographers who are so comfortable with chaos and so willing to let things happen and just see what transpires.

[dewdrop]

I watch Merce Cunningham on PBS whenever possible. PBS switched DANCE nights to Wed from Thursday and after that I missed the show alot.

[Nanatchka]

I've copied this over from Links for discussion.  I can't imagine ANYONE here who has the SLIGHTEST interest in Cunningham, of course..... 

You rang? The Cunningham company performed at City Center last night and will be in London this week, and then on a six week tour of Great Britain ,in Ocober. The London rep includes a dance called "How to Pass ,Fall ,Kick and Run," about which there's an article in this weeks DanceViewTimes. danceviewtimes

[Leigh Witchel]

It's a fascinating interview. I wonder how others on the board view Cunningham's processes of chance operation, and I was interested in the suspicion of them by a few of the choreographers. That said something to me about time and fashion - I think once Cunningham's austerity would have been in such vogue that even the questioners would have remained silent.

I'm curious how Ballet Talkers view chance operation. The most useful explanation I ever received was from a dancer in his company around 1995. Portions of it are buried in the Ismene Brown interview towards the end when she says that chance operation applies only to some pre-determined factors and not others.

What was explained to me was very selectively a choreographer's view. Chance operation could be a choreographer's tool, a method to force yourself not to move down the path of least resistance. Why not make it possible for the dancers to move in any given direction - backwards, or to the floor? And one could edit the results; what didn't work didn't need to be used.

[Helene]

What was explained to me was very selectively a choreographer's view.  Chance operation could be a choreographer's tool, a method to force yourself not to move down the path of least resistance.  Why not make it possible for the dancers to move in any given direction - backwards, or to the floor?  And one could edit the results; what didn't work didn't need to be used.

This past weekend, butoh performer Akira Kasai performed in Seattle, and on Saturday afternoon, he was kind enough to speak and to answer questions from the asmall udience.

He spoke about how he created his latest work, Pollen Revolution. He spend several months doing improvisation, and by the end, he recognized patterns that became the basis for the piece. Over a large sample, "runs" establish themselves when events happen by chance/randomness, although in the end everything averages out. In the editing process, Kasai took the patterns. Is that the equivalent of the editing process you're describing?

[Amy Reusch]

1964 First world tour and London debut. Critic Alexander Bland wrote: "Diaghilev would have loved Cunningham."

Am I wrong in thinking that not since Diaghilev has anyone collaborated with as many major artists as Cunningham has? Am I forgetting someone? Martha Graham, perhaps. Who else?

(apologies for straying off aleatory topic).

It's interesting to me that Cunningham has stayed married to the chance procedure for so very long... not that it isn't a useful tool or interesting, just that it seems so disciplined to stay with one admittedly radical idea for so long. You'd think that chance element or no, after so long redundancy would set in.

[Nanatchka]

Merce Cunningham uses chance operations at some point, or points, in the making of every work. It is a variable. He does not make huge amounts of material and edit it down. By the time he goes into the studio to work with his dancers, his work is already mapped out. (His remarkably detailed and complex choreographic notes--charts, sketches, and so forth--- have been published, for instance in his own book, Chances: Notes on a New Choreography.)Sometimes there is a very complex chance mechanisim (numbered squares on stage, chance determining how many dancers which square , as in the dance called Eleven, for the 11 zones into which he demarcated the stage floor in the composition of the work) sometimes less so. (How many enter? How many exit? Upstage, or down? Those sorts of questions. )As for redundancy, I would say that chance operations are the exact opposite of that, and in fact the enemy of habit. Cunningham uses them to open out his work to possibilites he otherwise woudn't see. However, in the course of thinking about chance, it is important to remember that it is Merce casting the dice, or tossing the coins--and as Pasteur said, Chance favors only the prepared mind.