Arts
Courtesy of Ballet Dance Magazine / The Dartmouth Staff
Without even a bit of dance knowledge under my belt, I came to believe in the Merce Cunningham experience.
Typical of Cunningham, rather than returning to a celebration of his past works for the seminal 50th anniversary of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, he continued on his ceaselessly inventive departure from his experience in traditional dance into a world of glorious experimentation with the most current in a string of innovative collaborators -- Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are noteworthy past examples.
Yet as complicated as his work remains, Cunningham proved that even the most inexperienced audience members could be given a chance to act as participants in the translation of his richly conceived work.
To call Cunningham simply a choreographer doesn't do him justice; his work blurs the boundaries between dance, art and music, and makes a commentary on all three.
In a way, it is appropriate that I was originally attracted to Cunningham's work through the music rather than any other facet.
And the notion of chance is what Cunningham's work is about -- "Chance Operations," to be specific, a term that Cunningham himself branded with his lifelong collaborator and companion John Cage to serve as a formula for the Cunningham experience.
Their famed method relies on the completely isolated production of all three forms of music, art, and dance in order for a natural, spontaneous explosion of creativity to occur on stage before the audience's eyes.
Each night, a roll of the dice will determine which of the two compositions will go first.
