Q & A with MERCE CUNNINGHAM : He’s Choreographing in Cyberspace

Merce Cunningham, the celebrated 76-year-old American choreographer, admits that he hasn’t quite mastered his new home stereo system, but nonetheless, he claims an affinity for technology. This Sunday, at the Variety Arts Theater, he will display that affinity in two dances he created with the assistance of a computer at the Interactive Media Festival, which is part of the Sixth Annual Digital World Conference. It represents the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s first appearance in Los Angeles since 1991.

Cunningham’s relationship to technology, in fact, dates to his debut as a choreographer in 1942, when composer John Cage made a percussion piece for him, “Credo in US,” which uses a radio or phonograph in the score. For the next half century, thanks in part to Cage’s ceaseless inventiveness, Cunningham found himself in one radical technological situation after another. His own curiosity, moreover, has also led him to explore new media as a way of expanding the possibilities of dance.

In the early ‘70s, Cunningham pioneered the creation of dance specifically for film and video. And it was about six years ago that he began choreographing with an experimental computer program called Life Forms, which creates figures to explore movement possibilities that can then be tried out on dancers.

He spoke about his relationship to technology at his studio in Manhattan in the midst of preparing a work with Life Forms that will have its premiere in Montpellier, France, in a few weeks.

*

Question: Technology has been one of the threads of your career, hasn’t it?

Answer: Somehow I took to it. I can’t tell you why. My family, they’re all lawyers, so there’s nothing like that in my background.

Q: A good example of how you use technology is “Beach Birds,” one of the works you’ll be presenting at the Interactive Media Festival. First because it was choreographed with Life Forms, but also because you’ve made a separate video, “Beach Birds for Camera,” that is its own distinct piece. How is it different making dance for camera rather than for the theater?

A: The space is totally different, so there’s no reason to think like you would for the stage. There are so many possibilities about changing the size of the dancers. You can make the figure full, then make it full but seen from another angle, larger or smaller; that, for example, changes the rhythm and changes the timing. The fact that you can shoot a movement from different angles is also a kind of visual addition to movement. Then there is timing: The timing between the movement of the camera and the dancers is slightly different.

Q: What about looking at the computer screen? What do you see when you use Life Forms that you might not see otherwise?

A: I think that in some ways it’s an enlargement. You know, you see photographs very often of someone doing something which you never saw that person do. The camera saw it, but our eye missed it. Well, the Life Forms [program] does this for me.

For instance, you can have the arms moving, and when you slow this movement down and see, in every detail, what the arms are doing, it simply, to my eye, enlarges movement possibilities.

Q: “Trackers,” which Los Angeles saw in 1991 and will see again Sunday, was the first dance that you made with the aid of Life Forms. How did you first approach choreographing on the computer?

A: I had had the computer only a very short time, when I was working on “Trackers,” so I was learning and fumbling and making all kinds of mistakes. At that time, you could not put a sequence of movement in; all you could put in was something like a single shot, like a photograph. I could put that in the memory, and then could put the figure in another shape, and have that; I would have, so to speak, two photographs. So “Trackers” has a number of stances in it, and that’s where they come from. And then by chance means, I made the order of these stances.

I think it was while I was working on “Trackers,” or along about that time, they jumped the program to where you could put a sequence of movement in it like a movie. The computer would do the movement in as direct a way as possible, from the first position you enter to the second. But the computer might produce the movement that I would ordinarily do at a certain speed at a totally different tempo. And I thought, “Oh, maybe we could do that.”

So when you see something you haven’t seen before you wonder--at least I kept wondering--whether it was not possible to utilize it. Even if you couldn’t do it, you try it, and in the process you might find out something else.

Q: One thing I’ve heard you say is that the computer, and I guess you can extend this to technology in general, doesn’t necessarily make things easier. Since you can only work with one figure at a time on the screen, it must become very complex when you put everything together with the dancers on the stage.

A: It really adds a mind-boggling element. Like, today I’m working on this new work, and I’m trying to work in a freer way. And while I’m trying to find certain things out, the dancers have to stand around--of course, they always do anyway--and then I say, “Now you go, and you go.” And then they all rush in, and suddenly they don’t know where they’re supposed to go yet, and they’re banging into each other. But they’re accepting it. I don’t do this kind of thing very often, but in this particular thing I wanted to try it out and see. It’s like those particles.

Q: Subatomic particles?

A: Yes, quanta. They seem to do something you can’t figure out, and then they seem to do something you can discern. What prompts them to do something together, I have no idea. But they do this and then they seem to flow together for a little bit and then they get all mixed up again.

Well, I think that that is one of the things that the electronic world has offered to movement possibilities, because it isn’t based on beat. It doesn’t eradicate beat but it enlarges the possibility of it, and that’s, for me, what makes technology useful.