DANCE : Dancing With a Mouse : After a life of creating dances the conventional way, Merce Cunningham is learning to choreograph with the help of a computer

At 72, with more than 50 years as a dancer--and nearly as many as a choreographer--behind him, Merce Cunningham might well be basking in the twilight of his achievements. With the recent death of Martha Graham, Cunningham--who began his career in an early company of Graham’s--is the de facto dean of master American choreographers.

The current $1 million Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to Cunningham’s company, the largest single sum allotted in this tight funding go-round and the largest ever granted a so-called modern dance group, tells a great deal about the troupe’s standing.

But a couple of weeks before his scheduled performances at UCLA’s Royce Hall (Thursday and Friday), talking by telephone from his aerie of a dance studio overlooking Lower Manhattan, he sounds like a youthful artist with his entire career still before him.

“Well, it’s sunny,” he said with innocent obviousness when asked how the day was going. Then, he admitted, with both eagerness and matter-of-factness, that he spent his morning working on the creation of a new dance. The work process, however, was not yet matter-of-fact for Cunningham. Lately, the past master of seemingly endless dance invention crossed a new frontier.

After more than four decades of devising choreography initially on his own body and then on those of his specially schooled dancers, Cunningham has a new tool on which he can dream up dances: a computer. Its monitor is arrayed with a variety of human figures contoured out of layers of concentric circles.

Cunningham’s new guinea pigs are created by specially designed computer software called “Life Forms.” This particular program was developed at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia by Tom Calvert. Thecla Schipthorst, a Canadian choreographer and computer scientist has served as Cunningham’s instructor since he was invited in 1989 to participate in exploring the possibilities of the program.

Working on his next dance, something like his 152nd, Cunningham has spent his morning “putting material into the computer’s memory.” He modestly calls his skill with the technology’s capabilities elementary. “I’m still learning,” he says. He marvels at the constant advancements and elaborations the program acquires with great regularity: “The capability is changing all the time, there is almost nothing it won’t be able to do. It just takes time.”

He noted that in its earliest stage, his work on the screen with a “menu” and a “mouse” meant going from one set figure to another, but that recently it acquired a new fluidity. “What was like photographs is now like film,” what started out as “work with positions has developed into work with phrases.”

Between his gaining expertise in working with “Life Forms” and its constant advancements, Cunningham looks at this new tool of choreography as a vast area to be explored.

“When I first saw this it hit me about notation. Even at this early stage, you could see everything very clearly, even, eventually, fingers,” he said.

In so doing, he was alert to the fact that after centuries of various--at best, cumbersome--systems for writing down choreography efficiently, here might be a precise and comprehensive method.

The sometimes reluctant pedagogue also notes the potential of the program as a teaching tool. Referring to the computer figure’s obedience to every sort of demand, even the defiance of gravity, he remarked: “It could, for example, show a movement in the air, so totally in detail, a student could really see what happens.”

Still, Cunningham must balance the computer’s perfection with the realities of human physicality. “I look at some things and say, ‘Well, that’s impossible for a dancer to do.’ But, if I looked at it long enough I could think of a way it could be done. Not exactly as it’s done on the screen, but it could prompt my eye to see something I’ve never thought of before.”

However impressed he is with the system’s accuracy and memory, Cunningham wants to stress his principal fascination with this new resource: “The thing that interested me most, from the very start, was not the memory--it wasn’t simply notation--but the fact that I could make new things.”

Frequently during his conversation, the iconoclastic artist, who has become synonymous with “chance operation,” called himself a “practical man.” He identified concerns of practicality that determined the repertory for Los Angeles, where the company last performed in 1987. “We have to plan fairly far in advance, but I try to choose the most recent pieces because they are the ones we’re most involved with.”

With the exception of his now classic “Pictures,” from 1984, the six works in the UCLA repertory all date from the last two years. Cunningham himself will dance in but one work on each program. Though this has been a familiar pattern for a while now, it has recently begun to change.

In the summer of 1989, during a London season, there were, for the first time, programs on which Cunningham didn’t appear at all. Pundits wondered if this was a sign that he was giving up the stage. Since then, however, the former one-appearance-a-program pattern has been largely maintained, with occasional programs here and there having no performances by Cunningham himself.

“Well, I enjoy performing,” Cunningham said. “But, I also enjoy creating dances for others. Creating for myself now, there are limitations that don’t interest me. I am interested in making steps,” he said, without even a hint of melancholy, referring to the fuller range of possibilities available with the highly skilled, mostly youthful dancers in his present company of 16.

Cunningham’s own performing in “Trackers,” his most recent work, which closes the first UCLA bill, will no doubt be of special interest, in part because of the presence of the still mesmerizing septuagenarian, despite his “limitations.” But, it will be of further interest to dance watchers as they learn in a program note that the choreography “was developed, in part, with the use of Life Forms, a three-dimensional human animation system.”

In the first of his computer-assisted dances, Cunningham supposed that “about a third” of the finished piece, which involves 11 dancers in all, was the result of his work on the computer. He noted that a walking passage for a cluster of dancers was a specific computer-gained element of the work. The sequence was concocted by plotting first the movements for the legs, and then, separately, the positions for the upper body, before finally putting the two together.

The fact that even elements of his own role were worked out with his computer indicates that Cunningham doesn’t simply see the device as a convenience to let him work while his dancers might not be free. He elaborated that the positions of the poses he takes during one passage were determined by what he found while toying with his computer.

The practical Cunningham is also a man of precision. His work with “chance” should never be equated with things aimless, arbitrary, casual or haphazard. To him, chance is essentially a means of selecting elements for his dance theater that are not necessarily in his personal memory at the time. His now-familiar methods for working with composers and designers, without making specific suggestions and waiting until the premiere performance to see the results, even have their variables.

Some composers do want to come see the dance while Cunningham is devising it, and sometimes designers have questions. “I’m not trying to keep anything hidden,” the choreographer said, allowing that neither did he want to tell fellow artists what to do.

Whenever he’s not performing in them, Cunningham watches his dances from the wings. In addition to scrutinizing the accuracy of his dancers’ execution, he times their performance, documenting the length of separate segments. The happenstance that interests him is the consistent relationship of the parts to the whole. While individual segments will be done with some variance in timing, by the end his dances continue to add up to the same amount of time.

From a career that began with doing everything from keeping the books to booking the gigs, Cunningham has arrived at a plateau where he can leave a lot of the non-studio work to others. He remarked that he felt fortunate to have an administrative staff to take care of things such as the ever-precarious finances. “I’m lucky,” he said, “they usually come to me when its nearly all done, to see if it’s OK.”

Chances are, nowadays, Cunningham’s staff will be able to find him more easily than ever. He’ll be in a cubbyhole of a room off his main studio, happily mousing around with some computer figures as tireless in their ability to execute unheard of moves as Cunningham is in his appetite to arrange them.