Битеф

radically different from those which informed his first dance steps back in Gentralia, Washington, where he grew up. studying with a vaudeville performer and circus bareback rider. Aspiring to be an actor, he went to the Cornish School In Seattle in 1937 and his interest turned seriously to dance. Two years later Martha Graham saw him dance in a summer program at Mills College and invited him to join her company, where he was immediately made a soloist. When he left Graham in 1945, he had already begun to develop revolutionary ideas about dance which led one critic to joke that he gave up the mother figure for Dada. Despite increased popularity, Cunningham makes no concessions to an uncompromising experimental vision of dance. It is the audience which has changed, he insists: “There is a growing interest in dance. Television has altered our way of looking at things. We hawe become more aware of the visual aspect of our life and of the multileveled quality of our everyday experiences.” I He may be right, but the most controversial issues in a Cunningham dance still revolve around his mode of structuring the many elements which go into a dance. He believes in the absolute independence of sound, set and dance. “One thing does not emphasize another," says Cunningham. He refers to his ideas about the dissociation of music and dance. “1 began to work with an unwritten relationship to music music composed in sequences of time rather than themes or expressions of an idea. I tell the composer 1 am working with how long the dance wil be and he composes his work independently. The music does not support the dancing.” Cunningham dancers rehearse without music and the sound and the dance are not brought together until the moment of performance. By viewing music and dance as separate activités, Cunningham feels both arts can develop more freely. “The music doesn't have to work itself to death trying to underline the dance, or the dance create havoc in trying to be as flashy as the music." John Cage, often referred to as Merce's musical alter ego, is the perfect composer to work with the Cunningham conception of choreography. For more than 25 years he has served as music director of the dance company. “I deal with movement as John Cage works with sound," Cunningham says. The professional association of the two men dates back to their first concert together in 1944. Cage played his original musical compositions on that now-famous “prepared piano" whose percussion

sounds emanated from strings interspersed with nuts, bolts and rubber objects and Cunningham danced to structured tempos which precisely coincided with the music only at the beginning and end of time units. Other avant-garde musicians in this country and Europe who have written sound scores for Cunningham dances include Pierre Boulez, Bob Nilsson, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Lamont Young and Christian Wolff. Critics often are dismayed by the more-experimental scores containing talk and loud electronic vibrations, but Cunningham likes the idea that contemporary composers find any kind of sound musically possible. The same freedom granted the musical compositions for the dances has been given to the artists who design the sets and costumes. Frank Stella had no idea what the choreography would be like when he did the decor for Scramble. “1 provided a movable backdrop of a particular measurement and color to go with whatever the dancers did with their bodies," he recalls. The set, made up of large strips of colored canvas attached to vertical support pieces of polished aluminium, can be moved with great flexibility by the dancers themselves and is particularly appropriate for Cunningham’s use of space. Perhaps one of the reasons contemporary painters and sculptors have contributed to the work of Cunningham is a shared vision of experience. His choreography has been compared to a Pollock painting, where the colors are dripped Independently on the canvas, creating their own rhythms as they converge and disperse. And as Pollock's paintings suggest an infinite extension beyond the picture plane, Cunningham dancers suggest an extension of movement into space. The dancer's description of Summerspace illustrates this point. I "Unlike the conventional theater space which is organized so that everything relates to a single point, an outmoded tradition which goes back to the vision of the royal box, I organized space in that dance so that any point could pass on to another point," he says. “All I told Rauschenberg beforehand was there was no center of interest." The painter went on to design a huge pointillist backdrop with matching costumes so that the dancers seemed to disappear as camouflaged animals when they moved upstage. Almost incredulous at the beauty of the combined effect. Cunningham still speaks with wonder about it. “I hadn't told him how It should be. It just happened." The decor for Walkaround Time is based

on Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass, and is limaglnatively rendered by Jasper Johns, the company’s artistic director. Johns has silk-screened designs on large transparent vinyl boxes creating a feeling of magical spaces for the performers. The new piece, Tread, with decor by Bruce Nauman, has 10 whirring fans which provide a strikingly effective contrast with the movement or the dancers. In a dance like Canfield, the electronic music of Pauline Oliveros, which includes acoustical testing sounds and dialogue about noise levels, is combined with Robert Morris' decor, a light which moves across the stage, and, of course, the dancers themselves. As Cunningham suggests, “If these three elements were to be offered separately, one imight not think they could be combined. He feels “they work well together.” A contrary view is registered by Clive Barnes, dance critic for the New York Times, who saw Canfield premiered without music during an electricians' strike. He emphatically prefers the silence. A more popular collaborations is found in the dance, How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run. Downstage in dinner jackets, John Cage and David Vaughan sip champagne and read amusing anecdotes from Cage's memoirs as dancers kap, pause and sprint across the footlights. Although Cunningham’s use of chance and natural movement suggests a comparison with Dadaist invention, his chance arrangements can be exceedingly elaborate, and his natural movement usually has a practical basis. Sequences are almost completely ordered by chance in Canfield. Based on a card game of solitaire, it involves 13 deals and 13 dances, and Cunningham literally determines the order of the sequences for each performance by a new dealing of the cards. But his chance procedures vary and although he likes the rich variety chance offers him, because he is dealing with human bodies which may collide with one another, he is more conservative in his use of random accident than John Cage. Pedestrian activity such as walking, running or jumping, while often present In his dances, seems more prevalent In bis latest dance, Tread. These movements, like found objects in a canvas by Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns, are structured into the art. Cunningham's idea that any movement can be part of dance has spawned a whole group of dancers associated with the Judson Memorial Church in New York. This group dispenses with physical technique and Is concerned with what

34