Another Dimension to Dance

Here’s news--you don’t need 3-D glasses to enjoy one of Merce Cunningham’s latest dance pieces. It’s puzzling news, to be sure, since audiences for decades have already known this to be true. But there’s a reason that one critic made this announcement when reviewing Cunningham’s “Biped.” The 45-minute work for 14 dancers is awash in special effects--drifting virtual figures, unmoored dots, showers of colorful lines--which reportedly hypnotize, enchant and make you lose your normal equilibrium.

The haunting starts early in “Biped,” which the Cunningham company brings to the Alex Theatre this week. A solo dancer, etching out lyrical and studied steps, is joined by two larger-than-life, transparent performers that clearly have also been choreographed by Cunningham. To the almost ghostly strains of Gavin Bryars’ score (partly live, partly recorded), they float over the stage like guardian angels who happen to have excellent technique. Then, poof, they evaporate.

But, according to critics, they leave a big impression. “Biped” has been lauded as everything from “one of [Cunningham’s] most radiant creations yet” to “a beautiful new dance and a major development in the art of stagecraft.” Because the images are created with computer software that uses tricks of perspective, they seem to be three-dimensional, although they are actually projected on a nearly transparent scrim at the front.

“It’s like having a moving decor,” the legendary choreographer says. Jeannie Steele, the lone dancer on stage when the first phantasmic dancers arrive, has another perspective. “We see the figures just as well as the audience can, except from the back,” she says. “For me, it feels comfortable, because I don’t feel quite so alone.”

Because Steele was one of the performers whose dance phrases were recorded via motion-capture technology to make the virtual clones, she has encountered her own image on stage. “It was like that old Billy Idol song,” she says. “I felt like I was dancing with myself.”

Since the premiere of “Biped” in Berkeley last spring, its high-tech wizardry, designed by digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, has been a hot dance topic. In general, the dance world is apprehensive about what might be seen as virtual intrusion in a realm traditionally ruled by real bodies.

But Cunningham--who cannot escape being called “80 years young” because of his ever-expanding creativity--has always embraced the new. Since the 1940s, he has sought the input of other cutting-edge artists, from the iconoclastic soundscapes and chance procedures of longtime collaborator John Cage to innovative environments by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

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When computers came along, they became just another way of expanding the horizons of dance for Cunningham. Behind the scenes, he has long used the LifeForms software program, which allows him to work out choreographic ideas with animated figures on a computer screen. Since Cunningham’s mobility has been increasingly limited by arthritis, this tool has particular appeal. And although computing has been known to baffle neophytes, he’s not easily intimidated.

“Oh, I just keep on making mistakes; that way I find out something,” he says on a cellular phone, as he is driven home to New York after a recent company engagement at the Kennedy Center in Washington. “When I started, I kept losing things and crashing. And I thought, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter--I don’t know anything about it, so they aren’t really mistakes.’ I’d just start all over again.”

But whereas LifeForms is an animation program that helps work out choreography on impersonal computerized figures, the motion-capture technology used in “Biped” allows a live dancer’s movements to be recorded and altered digitally, so that a new virtual cast member is created. To get through that complex process, Cunningham relied on Kaiser and Eshkar, who make up the New York-based digital art studio Riverbed. The duo first approached him in 1998, when they invited him to work with them on a virtual dance installation called “Hand-Drawn Spaces.”

Kaiser and Eshkar were relatively new to dance, and their decision to start at the top came about because of Kaiser’s friendship with William Forsythe, the innovative American-born director of the Frankfurt Ballet. “When I thought about working with dance, about five years ago, I asked Bill what choreographers I should look at,” Kaiser says on the phone from New York. “He said Cunningham and Balanchine.”

Once Kaiser and Eshkar decided to focus on Cunningham, they started to look at videotapes and read critical writing to get a fuller sense of his career. Kaiser says he particularly liked an essay by Edwin Denby, who wrote about the artist’s formative years (from the 1940s to the 1960s) as well as describing a sensibility that, from today’s perspective, lends itself to virtual innovations. In 1968, for instance, Denby was writing about the “strange sense of freedom and of space” that was created in Cunningham works.

Although appropriately impressed to be working with a dance legend, the digital artists found themselves having to put limitations on Cunningham’s process at first. As Kaiser explains, motion-capture technology at the time was footstep driven and they needed to start with many short phrases, made of no fewer than five and no more than 15 steps.

For Cunningham, that was no problem. “I guess you could think of it as a challenge,” he says. “What could you do in five steps? Well, actually there are all kinds of things you can do. It presented, to my way of thinking, different possibilities.”

When it came to working on “Biped,” the motion-capture system was already more advanced and about 25 minutes of the work’s choreography was decided upon for the process. Two dancers (Steele and Jared Phillips) spent three days in two specially equipped studios, where reflective markers (a bit smaller than a pingpong ball) were attached to strategic points on their bodies, especially joints. Twelve cameras surrounding the dancers picked up reflected infrared light from the markers, recording not the body per se, but the movement.

This information was then applied to a computer-generated figure in a software program called Character Studio (originally titled Biped, hence the work’s title), and the virtual dancers came to life. They appear in “Biped” as stick-like or curved figures, or sometimes as bodies made of dots, which--because they look very insect-like when seen from above--Kaiser calls “water bugs.”

In a way, motion-capture technology allows digital artists like Kaiser and Eshkar to become co-choreographers, sampling Cunningham’s dance phrases and altering them by hand with the software. It’s an assignment they both approached reverently.

“Our projections were done independently of Merce,” Kaiser says, describing Cunningham’s hallmark creation process, in which various parts only come together at the end. “But we had this strong desire to make them connect to the amazing world that he’s been creating for 50 years or longer. There are actually little homages to his work in ‘Biped.’ The stick figures, for instance--we started thinking about the divination sticks used in I Ching, and the way Merce used to use those for his chance operations [to determine the order of dance sections], so that’s where that came from.”

The potential for stage effects to overshadow the dancing is always a consideration. But according to New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff’s review of “Biped,” “the technology is at the service of a creative process and an artistic purpose.”

Says Steele: “My biggest fear was that people might not be able to focus on the dancing, because there was too much to distract them. But people say that the way it’s constructed, the images are really just another addition. They say it’s just a fuller experience for them.”

For Cunningham, the complex “Biped” environment reflects the way we live now. “It seems to me that a great deal of our ideas about continuity come from flicking channels on the TV,” he says. “Moving from one thing to another very quickly, we make a kind of continuity for ourselves--although we don’t think of it as that.”

Does it help if audience members understand the technical universe that produces the effects? “Oh, if they’re curious, they can go and find out something about it,” Cunningham says in a voice that sounds not unlike a kindly science teacher. Then he laughs. “But I think experiences are much better when you don’t worry too much about understanding. You know, Einstein said that imagination is much more useful than education.”

Nevertheless, Cunningham himself seems driven by an unflagging curiosity that leads him to learn more and more about technical tools. He’s already talking about all the advances made lately in the software he’s used. He sees lots of possibilities.

“When he first came to see the Character Studio software,” Kaiser recalls, “he arrived at our studio looking rather weary after a crushing drive through Manhattan traffic. Then, when he saw it, it was as if he took a dive into the screen and stayed there. He asked a million questions about making the figures move.

“The extraordinary thing about working with Merce is that he’s always involved in the present thing that he’s making, and he’s also involved in the future that’s becoming the present.”

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Sometimes, when the first phantasmic dancers appear in “Biped,” they are greeted with a round of applause, as if they were heroes arriving from outer space. Steele has heard it from on stage and says, “Yeah, that first image is very striking. I don’t think people can see the scrim at the beginning--it’s very faint. So when this color comes across, it’s sort of awesome.”

When Kaiser heard the clapping on opening night, he recalls, “I found it moving. I think they applauded partly because the appearance of the figures was unexpected. But it was also the fact that they were so right as an addition to Cunningham’s body of work.”

Cunningham seems surprised when told that people applaud the first entrance of the phantom dancers. “Well, I haven’t noticed,” he says. “But maybe they should do that. It’s visually very interesting; it brings out something else.”

What seems certain is that Cunningham will continue to investigate the “something else” that can be done with dance. But he hasn’t abandoned his roots--his latest work, “Interscape (2000),” which had its premiere during the Kennedy Center engagement, uses Cage music and decor by Rauschenberg, without a virtual figure in sight to excite the high-tech crowd. How did it go?

“It went well,” Cunningham says modestly. Then his familiar laugh returns, and he says, “Yes, we’re all heading back to New York with--so to speak--upright spines.” *

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“Biped,” Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. $15-$43. (800) 233-3123. Also on the program is a Cunningham “Event,” with live music and a Robert Rauschenberg set.