Collaboration
Dance counts Cunningham as one of its barrier-breaking pioneers, but the realms of performance, music, film, theater and conceptual art have also directly benefited from his radical innovations and collaborations with artists in a variety of media. It has often been said that Cunningham’s record as collaborator with contemporary artists and composers rivals that of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, which brought painters such as Picasso and Matisse; and composers Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Ravel to the stage. Of course, Cunningham's most famous collaboration was with his life partner the composer/philosopher John Cage. Together, Cunningham and Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. One of the most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship between dance and music, which they concluded occur in the same time and space, but can be created independently of one another. This spirit of independent coexistence and chance permeated all of Cunningham’s collaborations. The variety of accomplished artists, composers and architects Cunningham worked with is a testament to the brilliant challenge of working with him.
Merce Cunningham Dance Company collaborated with...
Visual Artists
- Morris Graves, Northwest Artist
- Barbara Robertson, Northwest Artist
- Trimpin, Sound Sculptor
- Robert Rauschenberg
- Jasper Johns
- Andy Warhol
- Roy Lichtenstein
- Bruce Nauman
- Marcel Duchamp
- Frank Stella
- Tacita Dean
Composers
- Brian Eno
- Morton Feldman
- Gordon Mumma
- David Tudor
- Gavin Bryars
- Pauline Oliveros
- Radiohead
- Sonic Youth
- Sigur Ros
- Pierre Boulez
- Robert Ashley
- Earle Brown
- Alan Hovhaness
- Alvin Lucier
Other Cunningham sound collaborators with strong connections to the Northwest include Stuart Dempster and Lou Harrison.
Cunningham's Impact on Performance and Theater
Cunningham and Cage, particularly their untitled intermedia event at Black Mountain College in 1952 (with Rauschenberg, MC Richards and others) had a profound influence on Fluxus, Allan Kaprow and the advent of Happenings. The Six Viewpoints, originated by Mary Overlie, were influenced by Cunningham’s theories. Peter Brooke in his highly influential treatise on theater The Empty Space (1968) uses Cunningham and his dances as examples of “holy theater”; and The Wooster Group in To You, The Birdie! (Phedre) (2001,2003) fused elements of Greek mythology with movement based on the sport of badminton and the dance vocabularies of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.
Merce and Technology
Cunningham’s career-long dedication to innovation made him a leader in bringing together performance and new technologies. Cunningham began working with film in the 60s, video in the 70s and was a pioneer in bringing computer programs into his projects. Beginning in 1989, Cunningham used a 3-D motion creation software program Life Forms (now called DanceForms) and the cinematographic technique of motion capture to map and experiment with movement. Another collaborative product of the Northwest, Life Forms was developed with researchers at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. In BIPED (1999), together with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, Cunningham extended the computer’s transformational capacities into a stage set of giant motion captured movement sketches and graphic explosions floating and rotating off into the void of the stage space.
Cunningham with Cage provoked a revolution in the arts, influenced in turn by artists like James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, Zen Buddhism, and Cunningham’s affinity with Einstein’s pronouncements on the relativity of the time-space continuum.
Recommended Resources
Key Concepts
Merce Cunningham’s art was revolutionary. His innovations were many and radical. He developed his own dance technique and was arguably the first to use everyday “found” movements in a dance performance without mimetic significance. He introduced Chance Operations to choreography and made indeterminancy an important compositional device. He replaced linear, plot driven dance with dynamic nonlinear structures that invited a multiplicity of interpretations. His methods of collaboration and use of the performance space were also nonhierarchical. Elements of movement, sound, set and light coexist independently in Cunningham’s work, and his dances have multiple, mutable foci. This “decentralized” use of performance space dismantled notions of the proscenium stage derived from the Renaissance. Perhaps most radically, Cunningham challenged the notion that dance movement must be an actual or symbolic interpretation or representation of other things: “If the dancer dances, everything is there, “ wrote Cunningham. “The meaning is there, if that’s what you want . . . When I dance, it means: this is what I am doing.”
Chance Operations
Chance Operations are compositional methods pioneered by Merce Cunningham and John Cage to challenge the idea of art as self-expression that dominated western aesthetics since the Romantic era. Cunningham’s methods included the making of charts and rolling of dice to determine such things as a dance’s movement, content and structure. As a result, any movement might randomly follow any other movement, based on the conviction that in art, as in life, it is possible for anything to follow anything else.
The word chance has a number of meanings. For example, it can refer to the probability of something happening, or to the occurrence of events in the absence of any obvious design. Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance in its sense as a probability of occurrence. In order to allow chance to play a part in composition, one must decide what aspects of the work are to be decided by chance and what the range of probabilities of each aspect should be. A variety of means can be employed to fulfill the chance process. John Cage used many different procedures, but most famously employed the method of coin tosses as prescribed by the I Ching, the great Chinese classical philosophic text.
Indeterminancy
The term Indeterminacy, when applied to music and dance, is most easily understood as an aspect of a work that is not predetermined, but is open to different possible realizations. In performance with live performers there is always a certain degree of indeterminacy, so it is the degree to which indeterminacy plays a role that suggests whether the term is applicable to a specific work. The term indeterminacy should not be confused with chance. John Cage, for example, often used chance processes to create works that were, in the end, fully determined. And while Merce Cunningham, used indeterminancy within his dance compositions, his works were never fully improvised.
minEvents
Cunningham’s site-specific body of work known as “events” collaborate with spaces and audiences. Cunnngham described an ''event'' as an uninterrupted sequence of excerpts from several dances in his repertory, designed to suit the particular space in which it is presented. These dance fragments are so intermingled as to constitute a new entity, which is satisfying on its own terms. “Events” also reflect Cunningham’s love of unconventional spaces for performance; over the years they included the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Grand Central Terminal in New York and a beach in Perth, Australia. A “minEvent” is a shorter version of one of these evening-length site-specific performances.
Questioning Conventions of Representation:
“A thing is just a thing”
Cunningham and Cage’s most radical point of departure concerned their belief in the innate expressivity of movement, sound and design. Inspired by Duchamp's 'ready-mades' Cunningham and Cage determined that any found or composed action, line, or noise did not require external narratives or overlays of emotion to be expressive. In his essay The Impermanent Art (1952) Cunningham wrote of a shift in the conception of representation that was sweeping the New York downtown scene of painters, composers and dance makers in the 50s: "There are no labels yet, but there are ideas. These ideas seem primarily concerned with something being exactly what it is in its time and place, and not in its having actual or symbolic reference to other things . . . A thing is just a thing."
Cunningham and Cage wanted to free sounds and movements from the imposition of psychology, and the idea that a sound in music or movement in dance was an expression of the artist. “If the dancer dances, everything is there.” Said Cunningham. “The meaning is there, if that’s what you want . . . When I dance, it means: this is what I am doing.”
For me, it seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen, is what it is. I do not believe it is possible to be too simple. What the dancer does is the most realistic of all possible things. And to pretend that a man standing on a hill could be doing everything except just standing is simply divorce. Divorced from life, from the sun coming up and going down, from clouds in front of the sun, from the rain that comes from the clouds and sends you into the drug store for a cup of coffee. From each thing that succeeds each thing. Dancing is a visible action of life.
— Merce Cunningham, "Space, Time and Dance," Aspen, no. 5+6, 1967
Recommended Resources
Text by Tonya Lockyer
Teaching Resources
Themes: Chance, Indeterminacy, Collaboration and Collage
Purpose of Assignments & Lesson Plans
We hope you find this site useful as you begin to think about how to bring the resources of the Merce Cunningham minEvent to your students. The following assignments and lesson plans are only suggested starting points – intentionally simple and open to elaboration. Our purpose is to engage students and faculty in Cornish’s year-long celebration of Merce Cunningham, encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration and foster curiosity about the influential work and philosophy of Cunningham and his collaborator John Cage.
For images, essays, video links and other resources, Cornish Faculty can access the Dance Program’s Student/Faculty Resource Site. See your department coordinator for details.
These assignments and lesson plans have been developed by Tonya Lockyer with assistance from Lodi McClellan.
Assignments
Lesson Plans
Assignments
Field Trip
Bring your class to the MCC Gallery for the Cunningham in the Northwest Exhibit with the purpose of responding in the moment, off the cuff, to what they see and experience. Allow the students to choose the format of their response. Note that there will be performances and lectures in the gallery including a live performance of Cunningham’s choreography and the music of John Cage Friday October 8, 12:15 pm and 1 pm.
Recommended Resources
Chance Operations
Assign a paper, performance presentation, dance, composition, scene, lighting design, photomontage or [your discipline here] that is composed using chance procedures such as flipping a coin to determine sequence, throwing a dice to decide length/duration, or consulting the I-Ching to determine topic. A common Cunningham method was to create a grid of possibilities and to then drop coins onto the chart to see where they land. Any of the parameters of an assignment can be determined using chance operations. Cunningham’s parameters included using chance to determine body parts used in dance movements, daily ‘found’ movements to be inserted, duration, spatial pathways, facings, entrances and exits (when and from where), and the number of performers on stage.
Discuss how the use of chance operations affects the possible meanings and reception of a work of art. Discuss scientist Louis Pasteur’s remark, "Chance favors the prepared eye" and how this relates to using Chance Operations as one aspect of your creative process.
Philosophy Inspiring Art
Cage and Cunningham often stated that the idea behind Chance Operations was to follow “nature in her manner of operations.” Invite students to sit quietly noticing how chance generates patterns in the world: observe the movement of life from a window or a seat in a coffee shop, or listen to the random music of noise and silence. Ask students to generate a response from their observations. They might decide to use chance operations to determine the structure of their response. For class discussion consider the following:
- Cunningham and Cage’s most radical contribution concerned their belief in the innate expressivity of movement, sound and design. Inspired by Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’ Cunningham and Cage determined that any found or composed action, line or sound didn’t require external narratives or overlays of emotion to be expressive. Discuss how meaning is generated in works of art that utilize chance. How does this effect the reception of the work of art? How do the artist and spectator collaborate in generating multiple possible meanings? (If you are taking a literary or theoretical approach you might note that Cunningham and Cage’s work and ideas pre-date Reception Theory or the writings of Roland Barthes.)
- Assign one of the essays or video passages below for the entire class to respond to in a discipline-specific format.
Recommended Resources
Indeterminate Collaboration
- Ask students in your classes to "collaborate" on a project, small or large, without ever discussing the details beyond length/ duration. Set aside a day for presentations of these serendipitous papers, paintings, performances, dances, etc. You might also consider collaborating with another class, or working with students with different disciplinary focuses.
- Use chance procedures to determine student groupings for a class assignment.
Recommended Resources
Deep Explorations
Ask students to view the Merce Cunningham minEvent website and Student/Faculty Resource Site. Ask them to choose an area to explore more deeply in writing or through a physical, performative or musical response.
Lesson Plans
Lesson A: The Collage Principle
Purpose
Students make connections between dance and other disciplines thru the aesthetic and philosophical principle of collage.
Preparation
Dance scholar Roger Copeland claims that “almost every aspect” of choreographer Merce Cunningham’s work is “informed by the collage aesthetic” (Copeland 167, 171). How? Starting in the 50s Cunningham’s “decentralized” use of performance spaces dismantled notions of the proscenium stage derived from the Renaissance. In Cunningham’s work elements of movement, sound, set and light coexist independently, and his performances have multiple foci. Cunningham also replaced linear, plot driven dance with dynamic structures that invited a multiplicity of interpretations.
Focus your lesson on collage as an aesthetic and philosophical principle that links Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg. Or for a more theater/performance approach consider Cunningham/Cage’s untitled intermedia event at Black Mountain College in 1952 which had a profound influence on Allan Kaprow and the advent of Happenings.
Connect class discussion to contemporary art and culture. Collage has its roots in the experiments of Cubism and political protests of Dada; but it anticipated the world we live in today where the collage principle can be found in popular music, the Internet, urban design, post-modern performance and graffiti.
Recommended Resources
- Copeland, Roger. “Cunningham, Cage and Collage” in Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004)
- Images can be found online of Duchamp’s early ready-mades, and Rauschenberg’s sets for Cunningham, specifically Minute which inspired Rauschenberg’s concept of combines. Videos of performances of works by Cunningham and Cage can be found online via merce.org, Youtube or thru the Cornish library.
Discussion Questions
- Explain Leo Steinberg’s observation that the way the ‘collage-principle’ functions is that when you look at a collage or assemblage, “Seeing becomes thinking”? (Copeland 169, 171). How does this impact the reception of a work of art? How does this relate to Cage and Cunningham’s beliefs about representation and meaning in art?
- Find examples to support Copeland’s claim that “almost every aspect” of choreographer Merce Cunningham’s work is “informed by the collage aesthetic”? (Copeland 167, 171)
- In Copeland’s chapter Susan Sontag claims that the collage-principle is present in many of the artifacts of the modern city. Do you agree? Give examples to support your claim
- How did Duchamp’s discovery of the found object inform the work of Cunningham, Cage and Rauschenberg?
Activities
- Have students use chance and indeterminacy to generate a composition in any discipline or ask students to generate a short movement sequence using chance operations to determine: body parts used in dance movements, found movements, duration, tempo, spatial pathways, facings, entrances and exits (when and where they occur).
- If students generated short movement phrases invite them to perform their phrases simultaneously in small groups, using chance to determine groupings.
- Consider inviting music students to perform a score they improvise or generate using chance operations, independent of the dancers.
- Perhaps share with a theater or production class and create a performance event that collages brief actions, found texts, scenes, sounds and dance sequences. Use chance operations to determine duration, tempo, spatial pathways, facings, entrances and exits (when and where they occur).
Assessment
- Through discussion or a writing assignment consider how chance operations and the collage principle impact visual art, dance, music, theater, performance . . . and how these art works are received.
Lesson B: Blurring Boundaries: Cunningham, Cage, Pollock
Purpose
Students make connections between dance and other disciplines and consider how these artists approached the perceived boundaries between art and life.
Preparation
Have students research Jackson Pollock and examine his work discussing elements such as line, color, and texture. Discuss the significance of indeterminacy in Pollock’s process, and the impact of the idea that his “drip” painting extends beyond the frame of the canvas. Suggest there may be similarities between Pollock and the "chance" dance of Merce Cunningham and the music of John Cage.
Suggested Materials
A copy of a Jackson Pollock "drip" painting may be found on the National Gallery site http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock. Videos of performances of works by Cunningham and Cage can be found online via merce.org, Youtube or thru the Cornish library.
Suggested Activity
Ask students to research these artists. Have students use chance and indeterminacy to generate a composition in any discipline or ask students to generate a short movement sequence using chance operations to determine: body parts used in dance movements, found movements, duration, tempo, spatial pathways, facings, entrances and exits (when and where they occur).
Have students share their findings about Pollock, Cunningham and Cage and then share their compositions. If students generated short movement phrases invite them to perform their phrases simultaneously in small groups, using chance to determine groupings.
Perhaps share with a visual art class and discuss the relationship between Pollock's abstract painting, Cunningham's chance dance and Cage's chance music.
Or join with a theater or production class and create a “happening” or performance event that collages brief actions, found texts, scenes, sounds and dance sequences. Use chance operations to determine duration, pathways, entrances and exits (when and where they occur). Consider a site-specific location. Both Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings and Cunningham/Cage’s untitled intermedia event at Black Mountain College in 1952 had a direct influence on Allan Kaprow and the advent of Happenings in the 60s.
Consider inviting music students to improvise music, independent of the performers.
Assessment
Through discussion or a writing assignment consider how chance operations and indeterminacy impact visual art, dance, music, performance and how these works are received.
Additional Resources
Cornish Student/Faculty Resource Site
Please visit the Student/Faculty Resource Site.
Cornish Library Resources
Please visit the Cornish Library minEvent Resources for books, videos, scores and CDs authored by and about Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
Recommended Resources
Cornish Media
