DANCE REVIEW : Getting Wired With Merce Cunningham

Formerly a monument to the glory days of vaudeville, the Variety Arts Center downtown has become a technological arcade this week, with exhibits for the ongoing Interactive Media Festival filling its lobbies on every floor.

The fourth-floor mezzanine alone offers visitors everything from virtual reality surfing to the chance to create a “Johnny Mnemonic” movie on video and CD-ROM. Dance audiences, however, will probably be more intrigued by “Improvisation Technologies,” a comprehensive six-hour digital training system devised to access the theories and working methods of choreographer William Forsythe at the Frankfurt Ballet.

On Sunday, modern dance pioneer Merce Cunningham answered questions about his Immerce visual database prototype and his use of the computer program LifeForms on all his choreographic projects since 1991. Immerce places the whole Cunningham media archive on-line, while LifeForms generates simulated human figures that enable Cunningham to experiment with movement away from dance classes or rehearsals.

To document the influence of LifeForms, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed two pieces shaped by computer input on the tiny Variety Arts stage. Previously seen locally, “Trackers” featured a howling electronic score by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta plus periodic appearances by Cunningham himself in a sequence of semaphoric hand poses and passages at a portable barre.

Dressed in practice clothes or leotards, his company explored bold juxtapositions of speed: extreme slow motion by one dancer versus normal adagio pacing by two others versus another soloist’s high-velocity motion, for instance. Flattened dance friezes--sometimes in overlapping layers--and a steady restlessness also marked this very first LifeForms-influenced work.

“Beach Birds” proved entirely different: an elegant, almost stately nature study with the 11 dancers dressed in white up to their armpits, with their shoulders, arms and hands covered in black. Cunningham used the hyper-extended line of these isolated arms to suggest wings and to trace formal geometric patterns as the piece developed from individual dancers bending, leaning and hopping in place to serene body-sculpture for groups of two and, later, three.

The spare piano tones and seed-tube rustlings of the late John Cage’s “Four” accompanied this varied, atmospheric movement metaphor. No further local performances are scheduled.

* The Interactive Media Festival continues today and Wednesday, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Variety Arts Theatre, 940 S. Figueroa. Basic gallery day-pass: $30. Special events extra. (213) 362-0434.