What moves Merce

At Stanford University the other day, Jonah Bokaer stood in a medical lab wearing nothing but a loose diaper and 50 small electronic sensors glued to his body.

Eight cameras recorded his every move in a process called motion capture that Hollywood relies on to turn actors into mummies and monsters. At Stanford, the technology is most often used to help doctors diagnose children’s muscular and orthopedic disabilities.

But not this time.

Bokaer is not a patient but a Merce Cunningham dancer, and the motion capture session was initiated to allow student scientists to analyze Cunningham choreography as part of a campus-wide, yearlong event called “Encounter Merce.” That encounter peaked this week with panels, screenings, exhibitions, displays of class projects, student performances, two programs by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and a visit by the modern dance pioneer himself, now 85, from his home in New York.

Widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s prime innovators, Cunningham began his performing career as a tap dancer but came to prominence as a member of the Martha Graham company in the 1940s. Unlike Graham’s body of work, his choreography became renowned not for its emotional or psychological content but for radical changes in the process of making dances, the collaborative relationship between artists and the use of stage space as many independent spheres of action.

As much theoretical as practical, these changes influenced a generation of American choreographers -- to the extent that a dividing line exists in the history of modern dance: BC (before Cunningham changed accepted ways of thinking about dance) and AD (after dancers accepted Cunningham’s example and developed his ideas in their own ways). As a result, general dance audiences have been affected by him whether or not they have ever seen his company or any of his works. And inside the dance world, he remains a titan.

In an interview Tuesday, Cunningham called the Stanford project the most extensive campus residency he has experienced, “especially in the variety of things that we’re involved with.”

The event is costing “a little under $500,000,” according to Lois Wagner, executive director of Stanford Lively Arts, the umbrella organization that spearheaded the project. But she pointed out that it was conceived as more than a mere tribute.

The concept, Wagner said, was to go beyond merely presenting isolated performances and deeply immerse the entire campus community in the Cunningham sensibility, refracted through an unusual number of academic disciplines.

Stanford dance department lecturer Diane Frank, a former teacher at the Cunningham studio in New York, said she’s always thought “Merce’s attitude toward dance work is investigative. It involves going to the edge of what you know, using it and getting beyond it. And that is the position of a research institution, which Stanford is.”

“Research” certainly proved the watchword at the Tuesday session of a class called “The Anatomy of Movement.” Three students announced that they’d sifted through the motion capture data to identify what class supervisor Jessica Rose Agramante, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery, described as “a set of four possible characteristics unique to Cunningham”:

* Biomechanical rebellion (defined as pushing the physicality of dancing beyond previous norms)

* Use of the trunk as a limb (the torso as an active, autonomous agent )

* Center of mass (the frequent, deliberate loss and recovery of balance)

* Changes of direction (the constant shifts that establish a visual rhythm in the choreography)

Agramante’s research and that of her colleagues have led her to conclude that everyone has a way of moving as unique as a fingerprint or DNA. “I know that the Defense Department is aware of how individual a person’s gait is and is looking into identifying people at long distance -- which is kind of scary,” she said. So the techniques learned through such projects as “Encounter Merce” may eventually take motion capture into the realm of military capture in an event we might call “Encounter Osama.”

But not just yet. Right now, Stanford technology is serving art, with some students analyzing Cunningham movement while others experience the unorthodox methods of collaboration that the choreographer pioneered with his longtime partner, the late composer John Cage.

Assistant professor of music Mark Applebaum, for example, organized a project called “Music and Dance by Chance” that, he said, “was an opportunity for my composition students to act in the capacity of Cage and for students to act in the capacity of Cunningham -- to come together and participate in the making of art. Not the artwork as noun -- the product -- but the making of art.”

Like Applebaum, composer and video artist David Behrman had worked with Cunningham in the past and remembered fondly his part in collaborations for which music and dance were created separately -- with nobody knowing how they might fit together until the dress rehearsal.

“The wonderful thing about the Cunningham company is that never has Merce or anyone else told a musician what to do or not to do,” Behrman said. “He left us a lot of space. I once asked Merce if he could tell me anything about the piece I was commissioned to do. And all he said was, ‘It’ll be about 25 minutes.’

“I always think of that phrase of Cage’s to describe a Cunningham performance: a movement, a sound, a change of light -- and each of those is independent.”

Behrman’s sound installation “View Finder” was one of the free public exhibits mounted for “Encounter Merce.” A Cunningham film series culminated Thursday with the premiere of Charles Atlas’ “Views for Video.” And Cunningham made his first public appearance Tuesday on a panel discussing the genesis of his company 52 years ago at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

“He built a company and repertory in three weeks,” announced panelist Carolyn Brown, one member of that group, while another, Remy Charlip, spoke about Cunningham’s dancing in those days as “absolutely fascinating -- and impossible.” Both went on to fruitful dance careers after their years with Cunningham.

Looking frail and painfully thin -- his mobility virtually gone because of arthritis and other ailments -- the choreographer spoke with affection of Brown and Charlip. But he focused on breakthroughs in the evolution of his aesthetic, including “the flash of lightning” he felt when he first read a statement by Albert Einstein that “there are no fixed points in space.” That idea became central to his own ideas about staging.

His company continues to appear in conventional venues -- it is scheduled to give four performances at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre in early June. But alternative sites have long helped him develop his quiet defiance of normal performing protocols.

“I remember a performance on a very beautiful beach in Australia, out of Perth,” he recalled in the interview Tuesday. “They erected a wonderful platform for us, and we went out during the day. There were already a lot of people there who came every day to swim. And when we began to rehearse, they began to watch us.

“My crew man thought we were going to perform in one direction, but I said no -- we wanted to play with the possibility of being on all four sides. And it worked. There began to be more and more people -- the police said something like 4,000, some of them down the beach and even on the water in little paddle boats. It showed everyone a different way of looking at how dance might be presented.”

Current company dancer Julie Cunningham (no relation) remarked at Stanford that seeing a Cunningham work makes her feel as if she’s in an art gallery or museum, “because there are so many different things going on, and you have to decide where to look.”

However, she drew a distinction between older works in the repertory (“simpler, especially in the use of the arms”) and the ones choreographed using computer-animation programs (“a lot more complex, not always a natural coordination”).

That seems an observation everyone accepts, including the choreographer. He joked that he likes working with computerized dancers because “they don’t get angry when you change something” and “they don’t get tired” when something has to be repeated. More seriously, he said, animated figures that appear human but can move with superhuman flexibility have often inspired him to attempt new approaches.

“When you try something that you think is impossible, it perhaps is impossible but will lead you to discover something else that you didn’t know about,” he explained. To pursue the same goal, he has long used chance procedures to construct pieces. “It’s looking at what I do in another way; it helps something else come out that otherwise I wouldn’t have known about, something that’s right for that moment.

“When I’m working on a piece, chance sometimes leads me to say, ‘Oh, that particular thing could have been done another way,’ and that idea sets me exploring in the next piece.”

A month before his 86th birthday, Cunningham spent much of his time at Stanford in a wheelchair, though he insisted that “every once in a while I can clutch the barre and stand up and show a little something to the dancers, something very small. And I’m finding a way to communicate with them through words.

“Of course, I’m angry at it. And I’m angry at myself for being in this condition. I can’t get up and hop around the way I enjoyed so much. But this situation has made me think about rhythm, timing, in a way I’ve never done. It gives me a way of looking at things that’s a little bit different, so I think I can still explore.”

In public and private alike, Cunningham continually reiterated his lifelong mission “to make the body as useful and flexible as possible,” to convey the power and fascination “of movement at its most naked.” And the search goes on.

“Every once in a while, I hit something new to me and I try to understand why it happened that way,” he said, “to understand what there is that I haven’t dealt with before. I always think there’s something else -- not necessarily that I’m going to find it -- but I know it’s there. And regardless of my physical changes, the possibility of finding something that I don’t know about always remains.”