A man in a black leotard and a woman in a long, light dress are dancing on an otherwise nearly empty stage. At first glance, this duet in Antic Meet appears to be a typical pas de deux. If it weren’t for the fact that there is a chair tied to the man’s back. He crouches down, the woman sits down on the chair, then stands back up, the two continue to dance. The chair is matter-of-factly part of the choreography – over and over the woman’s leg slides across its seat. Alas, though the movements of Merce Cunningham and his dancing partner are so simple and natural, one can still sense that dancing with a chair tied to one’s body must feel anything but normal.
This is precisely the contradiction that interests this dancer and choreographer born in 1919 in the USA. Merce Cunningham’s fundamental line of inquiry can be formulated thusly: What happens when you leave what is familiar behind and set off on new paths? Cunningham himself liked to elucidate his artistic approach with a quote from John Cage: “You play it all so perfectly,” the composer had remarked once to a pianist during a rehearsal, encouraging him instead to cultivate a different approach: “Go one step further, make mistakes, risk something.”
For more than 50 years, John Cage and Merce Cunningham were both partners in life and creative partners. Both of them risked something in their careers and are today considered great innovators in their art forms. Over the years, a host of companies have chosen to include works by them in their own repertoires. This recognition was however a long time coming for Cunningham, who began his career as a celebrated dancer with Martha Graham, before founding his own company, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), in 1953.
Beginning in the 1940’s, Cunningham and Cage presented several joint productions, in which dance and music were meant to be perceived on an equal footing as independent art forms. To accomplish this, the choreographer and composer agreed upon the overall timing but otherwise rehearsed separately from one another. It was not until the premiere itself that the dancers first heard the music. Merce Cunningham believed that dance could stand on its own independent of music, narrative or emotional expression. Because the meaning was not fixed, this allowed the audience to experience the dance in their own way. Like John Cage too, he used chance operations to make choreographic decisions for instance the sequence and timing of movement. In this way, ever-new forms arise beyond the structures inherent in a conventional approach to choreography. Later, when Cunningham was already in his 70s, he made use of a computer programme: “Life Forms” enabled him to develop choreographies that pushed the limits of his own imagination. At the same time, these pieces also went beyond what had been considered danceable up to that point in time. The involved dancers subsequently explored whether and how his daring ideas could be put into practice. To take new paths, to press on into the unknown, to create innovations and continually extend the possibilities of the body and dance, all of these continued to drive Merce Cunningham up to a ripe age. His 1999 piece BIPED, realised at the age of 80, serves as an impressive example in this regard. Here, by means of modern computer technology, dancers’ movements initially recorded in the studio were transformed into 3D animations, which could then be seen on stage alongside the real dancers during the performance.