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CHOREOGRAPHY THROUGH DERRIDA’S THEORY OF DECONSTRUCTION
By
Rachel Ellen Stephens
Submitted to the
Faculty o f the College of Arts and Sciences
of American University
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree of
Masters of Arts
In
Dance
Chair: ... DrJjtrett Ashley Cra$fard U
DryAprt&Smith ^
Cirsten Bodenstemer
Dean
Datela tip* ff 2005
American University
Washington, D.C. 20016
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2005
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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNEXPECTED SYNCHRONICITIES: EXPLORING CUNNINGHAM’S
CHOREOGRAPHY THROUGH DERRIDA’S THEORY OF DECONSTRUCTION
BY
Rachel Ellen Stephens
ABSTRACT
Both Merce Cunningham and Jacques Derrida are credited with underscoring a
generation of thought in their respective fields in the late twentieth century. This
study investigates an unexplored theoretical synchronicity between these two men
using Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. Three preliminary tenets of deconstruction -
the relentless pursuit of the impossible, the decentering effect of subverting the central
term, and the constantly changing and evolving role of meaning - are compared to
Cunningham’s technique, choreography, and approach to expressive meaning to
explore similarities. This information can be used to gain a deeper understanding and
appreciation of Cunningham’s work and offers a unique opportunity to discover an
unexpected connection between dance and philosophy.
ii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNEXPECTED SYNCRONICITIES: EXPLORING CUNNINGHAM’S
CHOREOGRAPHY THROUGH DERRIDA’S THEORY OF DECONSTRUCTION
By
Rachel Ellen Stephens
Submitted to the
Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences
of American University
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree of
Masters of Arts
In
Dance
Dr./Bjrett Ashley Crawford ; ___ Smith
Kirsten BodeTfsteiner
Dean A A (Sy&ufS ___ Date 2005
American University
Washington, D.C. 20016 B 8 8 ° l
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT 11
Chapter
1. VALUE AND IMPORTANCE OF STUDY. 1
Merce Cunningham
Jacques Derrida
What is “Deconstruction?”
Using Deconstruction
“Disclaimer”
Three Deconstruction Tenets and Three Cunningham Themes
Relevant Background on Merce Cunningham
Relevant Background on Jacques Derrida
Conclusion
2. THE CUNNINGHAM TECHNIQUE .27
Cunningham’s Deconstructed Technique
Evidence of Classical Traditions
Evidence of Modem Innovations
Torse as an example
Cunningham Technique is the Embodiment of Deconstruction
iii
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3. CHANCE 49
What is Chance Methodology?
Pursuing the ‘ Arrivant’
Subverting the ‘Central Term’ of Personality
Positive Results of Deconstruction in Choreography
Conclusion
4. MEANING IS ALWAYS IN FLUX. 72
Understanding Derrida’s Concept of Text and Meaning
Cunningham’s Rejection of Explicit Meaning
Let the Audience Decide
Walkaround Time as an Example
Challenges of Escaping Narrative
Conclusion
5. CONCLUSION, 97
Why Take the Risk?
Deconstruction Happens
Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY 108
IV
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1
VALUE AND IMPORTANCE OF STUDY
That art exists . . . has never sufficed to generate a philosophy of that art. . . . But when we turn to dance we find, first, that for various reasons the ideologies available to the other arts have not been available to it, so that philosophers could not bring it into their general theories of the arts.
Francis Sparshott, Why Philosophy Neglects the Dance
If philosophers cannot even develop an adequate account of the human body, how can they be expected to say anything true or interesting about dance?
David Michael Levin, Philosophers and the Dance
Merce Cunningham
On October 4, 2000 The Guardian pronounced Merce Cunningham to be
“Without a doubt, the world’s greatest living choreographer.”1 One would expect
such a strong opinion about an artist to raise the ire of other members of the field,
raising their voices to argue against such a value-laden statement. But, the utter lack
of response seemed to reinforce the idea that, given that dance greats such as Martha
Graham and George Balanchine are no longer with us, “Merce Cunningham is the last
of the great, groundbreaking 20th century choreographers.”2 The streams of platitudes
which Cunningham now receives, both from the outside and within the field of dance,
1 Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing o f Modem Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 2 Ibid. 1
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2
locally and internationally, seem to confirm his status as an institution in
contemporary dance. Cunningham scholar Roger Copeland believes that “Merce
Cunningham will eventually be regarded - if he isn’t already - as one of the three
most important choreographers of the 20th century.”3 Indeed, the opinion was repeated
in the 26 January 2003 edition of the San Diego Union Tribune in an article by
Jennifer De Poyen aptly titled “How Merce Cunningham Became, Quite Simply, the
World's Greatest Living Choreographer.”4 She argued that:
Cunningham's experiments with movement and choreographic structure, his groundbreaking collaborations with other artists, have reoriented our thinking about, and experience of, the art of dance. He is, quite simply, the world’s greatest living choreographer.
It seems as though, regardless of one’s personal opinions about Cunningham’s work,
its resonance on the art form in the latter part of the 20th century is undisputed. He has
been decorated with major awards and commendations within the field, and even his
fellow artists are not hesitant to supply their praise. “Consider the case of Mark
Morris, arguably the most celebrated American choreographer to have emerged in the
past two decades. In 1995, the dance critic Tobi Tobias asked Morris the following
questions:
Tobias: Is there any choreographer producing work now whose concerts you always try to go to, and always expect to have a very interesting time? Morris: Merce Cunningham. Tobias: Anyone else?”5 Morris: No.
3 Ibid., 7. 4 San Diego Union Tribune, 26 January 2003. 5 Copeland, 2.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. That a choreographer of Morris’ stature so easily and reverentially refers to
Cunningham as the most interesting around - over fifty years from the inception of the
company - is a testament to the deep impact that Cunningham has had on
contemporary dance.
Cunningham’s stature and influence emerges from his extensive influence on
contemporary technique and performance style, revolutionary choreographic
techniques, and drastic innovations in regards to performance style and philosophy.6
This retrospective admiration from the dance field in the 21st century may be
surprising to someone who stopped watching Cunningham’s career in the early
1950s.7 He was considered a “brash member of the avant-garde” in his early years,
stunning audiences and encountering frequent unpleasant receptions from audiences
unaccustomed to his unusual performance style, musical choices, and stage decor.8
But today, Cunningham is a recognized institution in the world of dance. It was the
introduction of his unique theories and philosophies on dance that initially separated
him from mainstream dance. But, the same theories that at first resulted in alienation
and rejection have brought him to the level of acclaim he knows today.
Jacques Derrida
Another important figure of the latter part of the 20th century is the philosopher
Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, a form of post-structuralism philosophy.
6 Ibid. 7 San Diego Union Tribune, 26 January 2003. 8 The Washington Post, 16 October 2003.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. On Sunday, 10 October 2004, two days after his death, the New York Times ran an
obituary for Jacques Derrida. It began, “Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French
intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult
philosophers of the late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French
president's office announced. Fie was 74.”9 This short introduction effectively
captures the essence of a man who was “openly acknowledged as one of the most
innovative and inspiring of contemporary philosophers.”10 Nicholas Royle, a devoted
Derrida scholar, espouses that we live in the “Derridian epoch:”
More than those of any other contemporary writer or thinker, Derrida’s texts have described and transformed the ways in which we think about the nature of language, speech, writing, life and death, culture, ethics, politics, religion, literature, and philosophy. More than any other contemporary writer or thinker, Jacques Derrida has defined our time.11
Both men, Cunningham and Derrida, are credited with underscoring a generation of
thought in their respective fields. The influence of each man resonates through his
own field and beyond. Furthermore, while Cunningham’s influence is by no means
confined to the “dance world,” Derrida’s theories are now applied to a wide range of
academic subjects, from social sciences to architecture to the arts, in effect opening
extended interdisciplinary discourse and understanding.12 Of importance to this study,
Derrida and Cunningham were chronological contemporaries - both exploring the
boundaries of their respective disciplines.
Derrida first appeared on the American intellectual landscape at a 1966
conference on the French intellectual movement known as structuralism at Johns
9 New York Times, 10 October 2004. 10 Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 85 min., Zeitgeist Films Ltd., 2002, VHS. 11 Nicholas Royle,Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), 8. 12 Copeland, 7.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hopkins University in Baltimore. He shocked his American audience by announcing
that structuralism was already passe in France, that the ideas were too rigid.13 The
work he presented at the conference “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences” would launch a revolutionary turn in linguistic scholarship and
introduce a movement in philosophy centered on the idea of deconstruction.14
“Deconstructionism revolutionized the way intellectuals and theorist saw the world.”15
Three works - O f Grammatology, La Voix et la phenomene (on Husserl), and Writing
and Difference all- first published in English in 1967, made an early impact on North
American philsophers and literary critics. Later, as his presence grew, Derrida’s
theory of deconstruction and these works would make a lasting and important impact
on the philosophical world and extending academic community.16 Derrida’s writings
and lectures gained him a huge following in major American universities throughout 17 the latter quarter of the century. “By the 1980s, postmodern academics were basking
in the youthful confidence of a new field. These were the people who, especially on
American campuses, devoted themselves to disciplines (the word is used loosely) with
the word "studies" attached: media studies, film studies, cultural studies and ethnic,
18 • racial, gender and sexual studies.” Demda became a central, though controversial,
intellectual figure at the close of the twentieth century.19
13 New York Times, 10 October 2004. 14 Roger A. Salerno, Beyond the Enlightenment: Lives and Thoughts o f Social Theorists (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 164. 15 Ibid., 165. 16 Christopher Norris,Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 242. 17 New York Times, 10 October 2004. 18 The Economist, 18 December 2004. 19 Salerno, 166.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Like Cunningham, Derrida’s early reception did not foretell the future of his
career.
While he had a huge following — larger in the United States than in Europe — he was the target of as much anger as admiration. For many Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education, and one they often associated with divisive political causes. 90
Derrida’s work was initially attacked by critics who mistakenly interpreted 91 deconstructionist theory as anarchistic or embracing the idea that “anything goes.”
One of the reasons that deconstruction is often attacked by critics or conservatives is
because of the threat they perceive on the idea of institutions and traditions. 99
Interestingly, the theories seem to do the opposite, as Derrida tries to persuade us that
deconstruction does not leave behind a “path of destruction and smoldering embers”
but is actually a form of “conservation.” 99 Because deconstruction theory has a
responsibility to understand tradition, is respectful and inherently indebted to it, it is in
essence, is the only way to conserve a tradition.24 Deconstructionists are often blamed
for ruining traditions, undermining laws, or destroying standards, starting wars or even
supporting cultish religions but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of Derrida’s
intentions.
Just as deconstruction is not a “kind of anti-philosophy, a justification for
rejecting the superior truth-claims of philosophers from Plato to the present day,”
20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 36. 23 Ibid., 37. 24 Ibid.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. *yc Cunningham’s technique is not anti-modem or anti-ballet. Better stated, the
Cunningham technique is the effective combination or ‘assemblage’ of the two
vocabularies. Derrida writes,
The word ‘assemblage’ seems more apt for suggesting the kind of bringing- together proposed here has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force to separate again, as well as being ready to bind others together.
That is, the idea behind deconstructionist theory is not to jettison the classical
discipline, but “to disturb it by way of exploring what systematically drops through its
grid and, by so disturbing it, opens it up.”27 Deconstmctionist thinking is not a license
to circumvent the important traditions which preceded it, if anything it is the opposite.
To approach anything via deconstruction, one must pass through the classical
traditions which laid the initial foundation for its existence. For Derrida, this means
detailed rereading of Plato and Aristotle, carefully avoiding the ready-made
'ya conclusions of what the philosophers mean. For Cunningham, this means passing
through the lessons and techniques of classical ballet lineage in order to reach a new
form of movement.
What is “Deconstruction?”
The theory of deconstruction links these two legendary minds of the late 20th
century. Although, Derrida and Cunningham do not share fields of study, but they did
25 Norris, 21. 26 David Wood and Robert Bemasconi, eds.,Derrida and Difference (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 44. 27 Caputo, 77. 28 Ibid., 79.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. make simultaneous, revolutionary discoveries in their respective fields both acting to
shape a generation of thought. The chronological synchronicity is evident; both men
came into relative prominence in their respective fields in the early 1960s. Though
Cunningham had been creating work since the mid 1940s, for purposes of this study
we are using the year 1964, the year he and his company returned from a world tour to
a welcome reception in the US, as a date which we can confidently say he gained a
certain kind of prominence in the eyes of the dance community. The 1960s offering a
fertile landscape for each man’s revolutionary ideas and actions, but this
• 90 • morphological coincidence cannot be overlooked. Morphology is “the study of the
structure and form of words in language, or a language, including inflection,
TO derivation and the formation of compounds.” Derrida’s introduction of the word and
idea of deconstruction directly coincided with the acting illustration of a similar
construct in the choreographic work of Merce Cunningham. Significantly, the
coincidence of theory and chronology that is shared by these two men that has yet to
be investigated fully. Furthermore, Derrida’s introduction of deconstruction theory
during this time period offers a unique way to analyze and understand the work of
Cunningham and illuminate our own understanding of his theories on choreography
and movement.
The term “deconstruction” first appeared in several texts that Derrida
published in the mid 1960s and it soon became the “preferred designator for the
29 Richard Kostelanetz, Soho: the rise andfall of an artists’ colony (New York: Routledge, 2003), iv. 30 http://www.Dictionary.com, 10 January 2005.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. T1 distinct approach and concerns that set Derrida’s thinking apart.” The term
emmerged from Derrida’s desire to translate and adapt to his own ends the
Heideggerian word Destruktion or Abbau32 In the process of translating these terms
he chose the French word “deconstruction” because it was “good French” (in his own
words) and the association of the term appeared very fortunate in supporting what he
meant to suggest, both grammatically and linguistically.33 ‘Deconstruction’ was a
word that was rarely used and was largely unknown in France, and it had to be
reconstructed and revaluated around the context and discourse found in O f
Grammatology.34
-5 c The word “deconstruction” has had a remarkable career. Its resonance in the
philosophical field as well as a myriad of other academic disciples and even pop
culture surprised its original author. Derrida has confessed on several occasions that
he has been somewhat taken aback by the way the word came to be singled out
because he initially envisioned it to be used in a chain with other words - such as
differance, spacing, and trace. In Derrida’s early work he essentially laid out a new
method of analysis unlike those proposed by the structuralists, an approach which he
named “deconstuction.” Though its origin was somewhat modest, the term
“deconstruction” and Derrida’s new form of analysis have made a clear mark on the
later half of the twentieth century.
31 Peggy Kamuf, ed., A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vii. 32 Wood, 1. 33 Ibid., 2. 34 Ibid. 35 Kamuf, vii. 36 Ibid. 37 Salerno, 164.
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Derrida and deconstruction are part of the larger theoretical school of post
structuralism. “Post-structuralism is a body of work that followed in the wake of
structuralism, but in which such structures are ordered primarily by local, shifting
oo differences.” Historically, post-structuralism is most clearly distinct from
structuralism in its rejection of structuralism's tendency to seek simple, universal, and
hierarchical structures. Within the discipline of post-structuralism there are few
theories in agreement, but all take as their starting point a critique• • of structuralism. ♦ 39
In general, post-structuralists tend to see all knowledge - history, anthropology,
literature, psychology - as textual” and it is from this starting place from which
Derrida espoused his new idea of a way to decentering reading and understanding
text.40 But, when Derrida called into question the very idea of a stable center,
essentially exposing the weakness of the theory, the post-structuralism era was
ushered in.41 There are other thinkers who are also associated with this movement -
Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault -
but Derrida is generally credited as the father of deconstructionist theory.42
In essence, the term deconstruction is a somewhat general anti-structuralist
gesture - it raises questions, challenges traditions, undermines hierarchies,
decomposes and decentralizes - but its fortune rests in part on its own ambiguity.43
Derrida explains in A Letter to a Japanese Friend:
38 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism, 20 January 2005. 39 Ibid. 40 Jim Powell,Derrida for Beginners (Danbury, CT: Writers and Readers Publishers, 1997), 20. 41 Ibid., 19. 42 Ibid.
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This word [deconstruction] at least on its own, has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what word is), and must always be girded by an entire discourse . . . deconstruction could not be reduced to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures.... Deconstruction takes place. ... I would say that the difficulty of defining ... the word “deconstruction” stems from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all the lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations, which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this definition or to that translation, are also deconstructed or deconstructable, directly or otherwise, etc.44
The value of the term ‘deconstruction’ is acquired only from its inscription in a chain
of possible substitutions, or ‘context.’45 The difficulty in easily defining the term
‘deconstruction’ effectively acts as its own illustration of the nature of the term. That
is, it is exactly the impossibility of defining ‘deconstruction’ and the constant flux in
meaning which Derrida wishes to illustrate with this term.
Using Deconstruction
Merce Cunningham is one of the preeminent choreographers and Jacques
Derrida is one of the preeminent thinkers and philosophers of the twentieth century
and the synchronicity of the lives and the deconstructionist theories of these two men
offer a logical intersection of philosophy and dance. These two men share a similar
chronology and relative impact on their respective fields which expands into multi
disciplinary thinking. Cunningham has a remarkable volume of work to his credit -
from 1942 until 2003 Cunningham produced 168 individual works - but it remains
difficult to easily categorize Cunningham’s works or theories. This makes him a
44 Ibid., 4. 45
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constant topic of debate and conversation.46 His work spans a chronological shift in
dance genres and is difficult to place clearly within either modem dance or
postmodern dance either chronologically or theoretically. He began his choreographic
career in the mid 1940s and early 1950s, which technically places him in the modem
dance movement, but his movement, choreographic choices, and disassociation from
expressivity and reliance on music give him a stronger, but not absolute, theoretical
association with the within the postmodern movement of dance. In his book Merce
Cunningham: the Modernizing of Modem Dance. Roger Copeland makes the
following statement:
I should state flat out that I don’t believe Cunningham to be the sort of choreographer whose achievements can’t be fully appreciated unless they’ve been ‘illuminated’ by the bright glare of poststructuralist, deconstructive theory. In fact, contemporary theory needs Cunningham more than Cunningham ‘needs’ contemporary theory. That is: Cunningham’s dances offer a working model that can illustrate - indeed embody - some otherwise, pretty obscure-sounding theoretical constructs.47
Copeland simultaneously recognizes the complexity of Cunningham’s work while
denying post-structuralism as a tool to a greater understanding. It seems, however,
that Copeland’s bias against theory only prevents a deeper understanding of
Cunningham’s work. Recognizing the philosophical culture of Cunningham’s time
and its implications on his choreographic concepts offers a unique opportunity for
deeper appreciation of his work.
Cunningham’s choreography not only matches up chronologically with the era
of Derrida, there are certain similarities which make a comparison between the two a
46 Merce Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, (New York: Marion Boyars Ltd., 1985), 203; www.merce.org, listing of works, 1984 - 2003, 15 January 2005. 47 Copeland, 230.
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logical choice. Cunningham seems to defy categorization into a certain theoretical
school of thought, but the school of deconstructionist theory has certain tenets which
seem to offer greater opportunity to better illuminate Cunningham’s theories and
choreographic choices. Hence, the question central to this thesis is to determine how
Cunningham’s work embraces the ideas of deconstructionist theory, as described in
the work of Jacques Derrida, and how this information can be used to gain a deeper
understanding and appreciation of his choreography.
Regardless of anyone’s bias against the application of philosophical theory to
Merce Cunningham, the amount of theoretical similarities his work has to
deconstruction and the frequency which critics, authors, essayists, dancers and even
the choreographer himself uses deconstructionist terminology to illustrate his work,
connections cannot be ignored. For the purpose of this study, three preliminary tenets
of deconstructionist thought - the relentless pursuit of the impossible, the decentering
effect of subverting the central term in choreography, and that meaning is in constant
flux - will be used to further understand the works of Merce Cunningham. By
investigating these ideas in conjunction with three of Merce Cunningham’s works,
connections between the philosophies of the two men will be revealed.
“Disclaimer”
There is one clear disclaimer that should be addressed before beginning this
study: In a letter written in 1983, Derrida clearly outlines the inappropriateness of
assigning models to deconstructionist thinking:
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Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one. Especially if the technological and procedural signification are stressed. It is true that in certain circles (Universities and cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological ‘metaphor’ that seems necessarily attached to the very word ‘deconstruction’ has been able to seduce or lead astray.48
The purpose here is to establish connections and similarities between Cunningham and
deconstructionist theory and to gain a greater understanding of Cunningham’s work
through a deeper understanding of the theories, not to assign his work as a model.
Three Deconstruction Tenets and Three Cunningham Themes
Deconstruction theory intersects with Cunningham’s work because the first
fundamental tenet of the philosophy is shared: the pursuit of the impossible. Derrida
scholar Neil Caputo describes deconstruction as “the relentless pursuit of the
impossible” in his book Deconstruction in a Nutshell.49 He chose the title of the book
as a reflection of his opinion that “whenever deconstruction finds a nutshell - a secure
axiom or a pithy maxim - the very idea is to crack it open and disturb this
tranquility.”50 In essence, the constant search for new opportunities, specifically the
relentless pursuit of the impossible, is the fundamental tenet of deconstructionist
thought. The idea of deconstruction is to literally deconstruct, break down, separate
into soverign pieces and to investigate in order to facilitate discovery. This relentless
pursuit of the impossible stands as one of the alluring tenets of deconstructionist
thinking because through the questioning and exploration inherent to deconstruction
48 Wood, 1. 49 Caputo, 35. 50 Ibid., 32.
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tactics, there is the possibility of new insight and new ideas. “Since its introduction,
the work of Jacques Derrida has traced wide and diverse paths of influence both
within and without academic disciplines. ... Theologians, architects, film makers,
painters, legal scholars, musicians, dramatists, psychonalaysts, feminists, and other
political and social theorists have all found indispensable support for their reflections
and practice in Derrida’s writings.”51
By using the word “impossible,” Caputo sparks the initial connection between
deconstructionist theory and Cunningham, because this idea of achieving the
impossible or of “cracking nutshells,” which Caputo repeatedly addresses as an
inherent trait in deconstructionist theory, is also reminiscent of a theme used when
some describe Cunningham’s work.52 Germano Celant, in his article “Toward the
Impossible: Merce Cunningham,” states that “finding the limits of dance” has always
been the impulse that has distinguished the work of Merce Cunningham.53 From the
beginning of his career, Cunningham’s ideas have centered on very basic questions
such as “what is movement” and “what is dance?”; effectively deconstructing the
actual idea or constructed image of how dance should be. Through this process,
Cunningham began to question how movement vocabularies are interpreted and used,
which led to a kind of annulment of tradition, and preconception and transforming
dance into “something impossible but real, rational but irrational, organized but
chaotic.”54 “If for Cunningham, dance is the representation of what is entirely
51 Kamuf, ix. 52 Caputo, 32. 53 Celant, “Toward the Impossible: Merce Cunningham,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 23. 54 Ibid.
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possible, it is also the representation of what is impossible, the attempt to do what
cannot be done” and it is precisely the attempts to make those discoveries which keeps
Cunningham in a state of continual exploration.55 In an essay written in 1994,
Cunningham said: “My work has always been in process. Finishing a dance has left
me with the idea, often slim in the beginning, for the next one. In that way, I do not
think of each dance as an object, rather a short stop on the way.56 Celant continues to
explain that it is the hope of discovering new dimensions of movement free from the
language of dance and the continuous promise of rebirth which motivates
Cunningham’s relentless exploration, even at the risk of failure or annihilation.57
Within the dance world, movement is generally classified within certain genres
- for example, ballet, modem, jazz, tap, folk, etc. - but it is not easy to classify Merce
Cunningham’s technique into the predetermined categories of dance. Is it ballet? Is it
modem? Is it performance art? While it is clearly a form of dance, it actively defies
the boundaries, blends categories, and makes categorization beyond that point very
difficult. The nutshell in this instance is the preconceived notions of what a certain
genre of dance should look like and how it should be performed. It is nearly
impossible to define Cunningham’s technique for anything except what it is - an
assemblage of traditional and innovative elements, borrowed from ballet and modem
vocabularies, with added elements of his own ideas about how bodies should move in
space.
55 Ibid., 24. 56 Merce Cunningham, “Four events that led to large discoveries,”Merce in Cunningham, ed. Melissa Harris (New York: Aperture, 1997), 276. 57 Celant, 23.
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Technique provides the foundation for the second illustrative point -
Cunningham’s unique approach to choreography. Cunningham utilizes objective
apparatus, such as tossing a dice, for make certain decisions in his choreographic
method. His purpose in using this methodology is to pursue what is known as the
‘arrivant’ in deconstruction theory. The goals which Cunningham desires to achieve
through the use of chance are the same as those that Derrida wishes to achieve through
deconstruction. In pursuing these goals, Cunningham in effect acts to deconstruct the
choreographic model of the time period. That is, Cunningham’s desire to remove
himself from his inherent personal preferences by incorporating chance mechanisms in
his choreography acts to subvert the “central term” of understood choreographic
method during this time period. The “central term” to choreography during this period
is personal preference. By subverting the “central term”, the idiom is decentered and
thus, is deconstructed.58 This opening allows for positive results to occur: the
expansion of his choreography beyond his own preferences and imagination,
unpredictable results due to the constant play in technical resources, and additional
discoveries which he would not have made if he relied solely on his own knowledge.
Third, it is Derrida’s interest in literary analysis that offers an additional
opportunity to investigate the potential connection to Cunningham’s work. Derrida’s
interest in literary analysis shows his willingness to engage in inter-disciplinary topics
and also offers another his insight into the relationship between the text/reader and
how that relationship is related to meaning. That is, within deconstructionist theory,
words have no meaning without the construct or context of the systems that surround
58 Ibid.
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them.59 But also that meaning is constantly changing and evolving, as opposed to the
structuralist idea that meaning is produced from inter-relationships within culture.
Derrida explains how the systematic play of differences forms the contextual fabric by
which the elements are related to each other and, as a result, how meaning is
constructed.60 The ongoing movement between and among text disturbs the idea of
fixed meaning.61
This idea reflects Derrida’s essential reluctance to accept “essentialism,” or the
classical notion that there is a single or ideal meaning associated with text. Derrida
feels that meaning is always shifting due to the constant play of between future and
past configurations• of traces. 63Traces can be considered * a kind of cultural marker
indicating the context and meaning of text at a given time. The play of traces is an
open-ended system, and argues against a code of repeatability, and differance is the
quasi-condition of the possibility of these things.64 Where structuralists believed in
setting up binary opposits as examples of essental truths, Derrida believed that they
represented an ideological dead end, not an avenue to truth.65 Likewise,
Cunningham’s work has no explicit meaning, narrative, or emotional context.
Cunningham states, “My ideas about dancing are all so flexible... I grew up with the
business of dance movement meaning something specific, but it always seemed to me
that a movement could mean a lot of different things, and that it didn’t make much
59 Julian Wolffeys, ed.,A Derrida Reader (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 76. 60 Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 26. 61 Ibid. 62 Caputo, 101. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 102. 65 Salerno, 165.
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sense to act like a dictator.”66 He is often given credit for liberating dance from the
burden of having to project various sorts of meaning (narrative, symbolism, personal
expression, etc.)67 His emergence as a choreographer in the late 1940s followed a
period of modem dance known for its heavy emphasis on narrative structure and
theatricality. Cunningham was not interested in expression, but in general ideas such
as space and time and how those ideas integrate with movement.
Derrida’s theory embraces the idea that “there is no central configuration that
attempts to freeze the play of the system” and that all language and all texts are, when
deconstructed, in a state of “free-play.”68 The “relentless pursuit of the impossible,”
listed above as another deconstructionist tenet, there is also a “restless play within
language that cannot be fixed or pinned down for the purposes of conceptual
definition.”69 In Derrida’s view, meaning is nowhere punctually present in language,
“that it is always subject to a kind of semantic slippage (or deferral) which prevents
the sign from ever (so to speak) coinciding with itself in a moment of perfect,
remainderless grasp.” 70
By using Derrida’s literary analysis as an example of how text is related to
meaning, and by recognizing his willingness to accept interdisciplinary ideas, one can
broaden this idea to embrace other related social sciences or art forms, i.e.
Cunningham’s choreography. Derrida is quoted in a 1983 interview as saying: “Why
should philosophy be reserved for professional philosophers? It’s a profession in
66 Calvin Tompkins, “On Collaboration (1974),”Merce in Cunningham Dancing in Space and Time, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 47. 67 Ibid., 158. 68 Powell, 29. 69 Norris, 15. 70 Ibid.
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which competence is doubtlessly indispensable .. .”71 Indeed, one of Derrida’s chief
concerns is to break down that rigid demarcation of realms which holds that
‘philosophy’ is an autonomous discipline, a pursuit of timeless, self-validating truths,
having nothing to do with ... everyday experiences.”72 The philosophy of
deconstruction seems a logical choice to expand and apply to a wide range of
interdisciplinary topics, not in small part, because of its flexibility.
Relevant Background on Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham and Jacques Derrida represent two revolutionary minds of
the second half of the 20th century. Their contributions to their respective fields have
opened up a wide range of possibilities for additional study and discovery. While it is
possible to find similarities between the two men’s theories, it is more difficult to find
similarities other than a basic chronological synchronicity, in their early lives;
Cunningham was bom and raised in the United States while Derrida was bom and
raised in Algeria and spent the latter half of his life in France, they speak different
languages, and come from very different career backgrounds. But, the early lives of
these men, their influences and backgrounds, do help us to gain insight into their later
actions, theories, and choices.
Merce Cunningham was bom in Centralia, Washington, USA in 1919. His
early dance training was limited, but his general interest in both dancing and acting,
71 Wood, 77. 72 Norris, 12.
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led him to the Cornish School where he began dance training in the modernist
traditions.• • I'X He worked with dance teachers at the Cornish School to attend a summer
program at Mills College, where the entire Bennington School of Dance was in
residence.74 It was there he encountered The Martha Graham Company. Martha
Graham invited him to come to New York to dance, an invitation which Cunningham
said that she probably never expected him to take her up on, but he did.
Cunningham moved to New York in September 1939 and began studies with
nc the Martha Graham Company. While serving in the company Cunningham became
known for his jumps and sheer physicality. In an effort to enhance his technique,
Graham suggested he begin studies at the School of American Ballet because she
thought that it would be beneficial to experience another type of technique and to train
his body in a different way. In trying to figure out how the movement translated to his
own body while trying to enlarge those movements, Cunningham shaped the way he
worked and created movement.
The foundations for what would later become “the Cunningham technique”
were formed during this period. It was in 1944 that Cunningham began to create solos
which he presented in self-produced shows with John Cage. Cunningham had first
met Cage during his time at the Cornish School when Cage was visiting the school as • 1ft a musician. Cage later encouraged him to leave Graham’s company in 1946. They
gave several concerts together in the mid to late 1940s and, during this period,
73 Melissa Harris, ed., Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, with a chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 17. 74 Ibid, 37. 75 Harris, 22. 76 James Klosty, “Introduction,”Merce in Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975), 11.
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Cunningham also choreographed for Ballet Society ( The Seasons 1948).77 It would
mark the beginning of a long, creative partnership between Cunningham and Cage.
Cunningham and Cage spent their first summer at Black Mountain College, in
North Carolina, in 1948.78 They were joined there by other artists and musicians,
including Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard and Louise
Lippold, and M.C. Richards. The artistic collaborations and developments in style and
theory which Cunningham developed in this and subsequent trips to Black Mountain
give importance to his time spent there. According to Black Mountain historian
Martin Duberman, these summers fostered Cunningham’s growth as an artist, “...he
really existed up there - in a way that very few people I’d ever seen had.”70
Cunningham returned to Black Mountain in 1952, this time joined by David Tudor,
Robert Rauschenberg, Katherine Litz, Cy Twombly, Remy Charlip and others. 80
According to Cage, events of this “summer crystallized the Cage-Cunningham esthetic
- the denial of center, the structure in terms of time, the creation of what he calls ‘a
purposeless, anarchic situation which nevertheless is made practical and functions.’” 81
It also allowed for a collaborative exploration within a welcoming, non-judgmental,
Q'y and educational environment. In the summer of 1953 Cunningham was joined at
Black Mountain by some of the dancers he was training at the time - Carolyn Brown,
Viola Farber, Anita Dencks, Paul Taylor, and others - and together they rehearsed as
77 Lincoln Kirstein, “Lincoln Kirstein”Merce in Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975), 89. 78 Harris, 46. 79 Ibid., 48. 80 Ibid., 65. 81 Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: an Exploration in Community (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972), 351. 82 Ibid., 72.
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Cunningham created a whole repertory of work. These works, including Banjo, Dime
a Dance, Suite by Chance, and Septet; they marked the inception of the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC).
Throughout the 1950s, the company continued to tour and Cunningham
continued to create new works. The company had its first touring dates in the spring
and summer of 1955. For the rest of the decade, MCDC continued to introduce
Cunningham’s unique theory on dance movement and its relationship, or lack there of,
to music and expression. Artistic communities and the modem dance world were
beginning to understand and embrace the revolutionary ideas Cunningham was
introducing, not in small part due to the visual artists and musicians of the time period
which shared these opinions. His [Cunningham’s] ideas were not unique, they were
shared by friends; composers (John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Christian
o r Wolff); and painters (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, etc.). The late 1950s and
early 1960s were a time of innovation and creativity in the modem dance world.
Cunningham’s creativity and fostering of innovation played a direct role in this.
Relevant Background on Jacques Derrida
Information on Derrida’s early years and many of the personal details of his
life are limited. His early life and personal background are topics not discussed in
83 Ibid., 73. 84 Ibid., 85. 85 Harris, 48
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interviews, publications, or other scholarly works. In an interview with
documentarian Amy Ziering Kofman in 2002 he stated:
Classical philosophers avoid autobiography. It is because they think it is indecent. That is, a philosopher should not speak of himself as an empirical being and this impoliteness or this politeness is philosophy itself in principle.86
Thus, there is a documented hesitancy expressed by Derrida to reveal biographical
insights which can, in turn, be used as a disclaimer for any historical gaps or voids of
information one may find regarding the philosopher. In fact, for seventeen years, from
1962 to 1979, he refused to even be photographed for publication, “in an effort to keep
his face — square, with a strong nose, thick eyebrows, dark skin and bushy white hair -
- from becoming part of the investigation for meaning in his work.” Derrida87
specifically heads off the usual questions about childhood or personal background
because he does not believe that ‘life’ information necessarily provides a one-way
causal influence on ‘work.’ “They only become relevant to his writing insofar as they
take the form of a relentless interrogation of philosophy by one who - for whatever
reason - shares rather few of philosophy’s traditional beliefs.” 88 Still • it • may be useful
- with this disclaimer in mind - to review the pertinent facts of his life to establish a
firm chronology and to better understand the events, influences, and cultural
environments that may have led to the formation of deconstruction theory.
Jacques Derrida was born on 15 July 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria to the family of
a prosperous salesman of Sephardic Jewish extraction. Early family life is
infrequently documented, but when it is, is noted to have been comfortable and
86Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 85 min., Zeitgeist Films Ltd., 2002, VHS. 87The Washington Post, 10 October 2004. 88 Norris, 12.
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pleasant.80 At age 12, he was expelled from his • French school when the rector,
adhering to the Vichy government's racial laws, ordered a drastic cut in Jewish
enrollment.90 This early exposure to anti-Semitism would later find its way into his
writings, specifically in the form of a general sensitivity to problems of identification
and ideas of the central versus the marginal.91 Derrida’s “sense of extreme isolation as
the child of a largely assimilated Jewish family during a time of mounting persecution
and racial violence were ... undoubtedly formative influences and may therefore be
Q'y placed on record.”
Following this experience, Derrida’s career as a student was punctuated with
indifference. He failed his baccalaureate in his first attempt. He twice failed his
entrance exam to the Ecole Normal Superieure, the traditional cradle of French
• • • QT • • • intellectuals, where he was finally admitted in 1952. After finally achieving his
admittance to the Ecole Normal, he began his formal philosophical education.94 But
even prior to the move to France, Derrida was a voracious reader whose eclectic
interests embraced the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche,
Sartre, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and the poet Paul Valery.95 During this time he
also married his wife Marguerite Aucouturier, who was the sister of a school friend,
and who later became a practicing psychoanalyst.96 He graduated in 1956, after
passing the oral portion of his final exams after a failed first attempt, and studied
89 Powell, 10. 90 Norris, 12. 91 Powell, 10. 92 Norris, 12. 93 New York Times, 10 October 2004. 94 Ibid. 95 Norris, 12. 96 Salerno, 164.
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briefly at Harvard University in the United States through 1957. 07 In the early 1960s
he began teaching at the Ecole Normale where he taught the history of philosophy and
his own research.98
Conclusion
In conclusion, this study offers an opportunity to look at the theories of two
important minds of the late 20th century, Merce Cunningham and Jacques Derrida, in
order to explore the similarities between the two. Though working in very different
fields of study, both men challenged the mainstream thinking their respective fields
with unconventional ideas and revolutionary new ways to approach old problems. In
addition, they share a certain time and place in history, the 1960s, a time of rebellion,
youthful insurgence and free thinking. By looking at three tenets of deconstructionist
thought, within the works of Jacques Derrida, in tandem with three similar themes
found in the choreographic work of Merce Cunningham, a greater understanding of
both can be achieved. Cunningham offers a unique opportunity for study because of
the uncommon qualities of his movement, choreography and theories on movement.
Using deconstruction theory gain a greater insight into his work is a logical
intersection between philosophy and dance.
97New York Times, 10 October 2004. 98 Salerno, 164.
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THE CUNNINGHAM TECHNIQUE
I’ve always been interested in the possible extension of the technical range. . . . One of the ways I thought to go was to use ideas that have been and are still in the modern dance, the use of the torso, use of the body moving and the ballet where they use the legs, so I thought maybe if you work at it, there is a way to use both, all together.
I like the word that Buckminster Fuller used so often - synergy - two opposites coming together to create something else and they are not things that you think that can be put together, but they somehow get put together in a certain way and they produce another result which you , in a sense, can’t predict so it’s an unknown possibility rather than a known possibility and that interests me more than preparing ahead of time something which is to have a certain effect, done a certain way . . . to make a situation where the result is unpredictable.
Merce Cunningham, Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t
Cunningham’s technique effectively straddles two distinct entities, ballet and
modern dance, which unsettles the paradigm of definition of each. This unsettling
effect does not act in opposition to either genre, nor is it trying to somehow diminish
or derail, but instead offers up a unique assemblage of ideas. The evidence of this
assemblage is in the technique itself. Cunningham utilizes certain balletic traits, such
as lightness, the turned-out leg, and rhythmic structures, as well as modernist traits
such as gravity, the focus on the spine and an idea of “decentered-ness.” The
juxtaposition of these ideas reveals Cunningham’s deconstruction of both technique
and his desire to keep exploration of movement open to all possibilities, not just
preconceived notions of what technique already looked like.
27
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Cunningham’s Deconstructed Technique
Though there may be little documentation of literal, conscious connections
between Cunningham’s work and Derrida’s theories per se; to some, the evidence of
their shared philosophies is found within the Cunningham Technique. Mikhail
Baryshnikov, noted classically trained ballet dancer, performed with Cunningham’s
company in a reconstruction of Walkaround Time in 1997, and said of Cunningham
“he sort of deconstructed classicism in his work, in his language." That is, through
the combination of fundamentals from classical traditions of ballet and his own
innovative movement vocabulary, he has effectively formed his own artistic aesthetic
that pries open conventional definition. In this instance, Baryshnikov has identified
the two entities assembled within the Cunningham technique, the movement
vocabularies of ballet and modem dance. Deconstruction begins when the viewer can
begin to “read” or locate the stress points where the subject resists any attempt to
reduce itself to an order of uni vocal (single-voiced) tmth. Here, the beginning is
within the assemblage of these two ideas, for Cunningham these “ideas” were dance
techniques - ballet and modem.100
Although oversimplified, for purposes of this study, ballet will represent the
traditional and modem dance the innovative. Though these titles may seem arbitrary,
ballet is typically held as the classic or traditional standard in the language of the
Western dance aesthetic, regardless of its validity. In fact, Roger Copeland, a noted
99 Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance, directed by Charles Atlas. 90 minutes. Coproduction of Thurlean/WNET, INA, LaSept ARTE, BBC, and NPS, 2000, DVD. 100 Christopher Norris,Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 86.
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Cunningham scholar has pointed out that ballet is actually innovative and flexible
“Ultimately, it was ballet, not modem dance, that proved eager to assimilate uniquely
20th century movements as various as cubism, dada, futurism, and jazz.”101 But for
purposes here, the traditional paradigm will be based chronologically not theoretically
or stylistically, thus establishing ballet as tradition (what came before) and modem as
innovation. Ballet has a longer history and a more formal structure of standardization
than modem dance does, though modem dance does have its own unique history with
standards of its own.
Cunningham’s technique came to embrace both balletic and modernist
qualities as a result of his exposure to both ballet and modem forms at a pivotal
moment in his life. Like many other choreographers, Cunningham has his own theory
on what dance is, what dance movement should be, and how it should be understood
throughout the body.
Dancing is an act of concentration taking visible form in a way that cannot be done otherwise. It is its own necessity. Dance is movement of the human body in time and space ... We cannot move as the antelopes, or the elephants, or even the dogs that inhabit our world so familiarly. The structure of the human body permits of certain circumscribed actions.
By combining the elements of ballet and modem he finds the technical language
which can effectively relay this belief system. The realization of his technical
language was a result of formative experiences early in his career.
101 Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing o f Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 102. 102 Merce Cunningham, “Excerpts from Lecture-Demonstration given at Ann Halprin’s Dance Deck,” in Merce Cunningham, ed. Melissa Harris (New York: Aperture, 1997), 100.
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As mentioned in chapter one, Cunningham’s early training was in modem
dance, not ballet. Cunningham moved to New York in September 1939 and began
studies with the Martha Graham Company, a noted modem dance company of the
period.103 Graham was one of the reigning leaders of the modem dance world when
Cunningham first began to choreograph; she remains today one of the seminal figures
in modern dance. Like Cunningham, Graham had very distinct ideas about how dance
movement should look, where it should originate, ideas to avoid, and ideas to
embrace. The movement ideas she was most closely associated with - such as a
roundness of the torso, created by contracting the center, and connection to gravity -
became ideas most closely associated with modem dance of this time period. Her
dancing drew from the expressive power of the body’s contact with the ground; it
embraced gravity, and “possessed a monolithic quality, a heaviness of movement and
gestures.”104 According to Cal Tompkins, it struck some as odd that Graham would
become so enthusiastic about a dancer like Cunningham, whose natural gifts - bounce
and lightness, and astonishing speed -seemed almost the direct opposite of her own
needs.105 But, his training with Graham gave Cunningham a different kind of
movement experience, one colored by weight and gravity. He would choose to
incorporate this in his work, only in a very different way.
While serving in the company Graham suggested he begin studies at the
School of American Ballet because she thought that it would be beneficial to
103 Melissa Harris, ed., Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, with a chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 22. 104 Calvin Tompkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five masters of the avant-garde (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), 254. 105 Ibid.
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experience another type of technique and to train his body in a different way.106 This
1 r y j was not something that Graham suggested to many of her dancers. The Graham
technique has some elements that are in direct conflict with classical ballet training.
For example, the Graham technique’s connection to gravity, evidenced in its low,
weighted pile, is quite different from how ballet interprets that relationship. Ballet
attempts to actively defy gravity, or at least give the illusion of transcending it. 108
Even the floor exercises that began her daily classes were in direct opposition to the
standing barre exercises which begin ballet classes. Her request for Cunningham to
attend classes was an unusual request, but the resulting effect was more unexpected.
When Cunningham was in the early stages of creating his technique, he was
taking classes with both Graham and at the School of American Ballet. The
chronological synchronicity of these two training methods, colliding in the early
1940s, would lay the foundation for the assemblage of traditional and innovative
elements in Cunningham’s technique. But, by early 1942, Cunningham had
discovered that neither technique was ideal and that he desired to forge ahead with his
own discoveries:
I began to fear that the Graham work was not in lots of ways sufficient for me. I suppose it came about from looking at other dancing and being involved with the ballet - something about the air, and the way she thought about dancing. So I began to do this thing I do of giving myself a class every day, and trying to experiment and push further. I don’t mean to say I knew everything, because I didn’t, but I would do what I knew, and then push beyond that, and see what else I could find.109
106 Harris, 38. 107 Harris, 23. 108 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (New Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 4. 109 Ibid., 26.
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From these daily classes, Cunningham began to understand how to do certain
movements as they made sense to him, not just following a preconceived
methodology. He would take ideas that he was told in class, for example “extend the
leg at a 180° angle and to keep the back straight” in ballet or the floor exercises in a
Graham class and then he would ask himself “How do I do that? He ” found
conclusions about how to achieve the movement.110 When he was told to keep his
arms wide, he would ask “from where does that movement originate?” And through
these investigative exercises, done on his own, he began to assemble the ideas that
formed his technical vocabulary. Cunningham said of this time period,
I’m sure that it’s really at that time that something gradually began to happen, even though I couldn’t know what it was ... What I was trying to find out was how people move, within my own experience, which I kept trying to enlarge. If I saw something that I didn’t understand then I would try it, I still do.111
To further elucidate Cunningham’s assemblage of both the classical traditions
of ballet and modem innovations, an example of a specific work is necessary. Torse
offers a glimpse of how the assemblage within Cunningham’s technique is realized on
the stage. The selection of this piece is only to have a working example, not to
intentionally give it any special recognition from the other works in Cunningham’s
repertoire. The Cunningham technique and its resultant assemblage is evident in all of
his works; nonetheless, Torse serves well to demonstrate assemblage of classical
elements and modem innovations.
110 Merce Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, ed. Jacqueline Leeschaeve (New York: Marion Boyars Ltd., 1985), 42. 111 Ibid., 43.
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Evidence of Classical Traditions
Though it is difficult to clearly place Cunningham in either genre of dance, “it
has become commonplace to refer to Cunningham’s choreography as ‘classical,’
largely because the basic look and feel of his dancers is so much more ‘balletic’ than
Martha Graham’s.”112 Graham and many of the other “early pioneers of modem
dance rejected what they believed to be the ‘artificial’ vocabulary of ballet in favor or
i movements more in keeping with the ‘natural’ inclinations of the body.” One of
these natural inclinations was the acceptance, as opposed to the active defiance within
ballet, of gravity. By the late 1940s, almost everyone in the world of modem dance
had embraced the idea of gravity as an essential element of modem dance - everyone
that is, except Merce Cunningham.114 But Cunningham did not turn completely away
from the idea of gravity, he states in an essay, “One of the best discoveries the modem
dance has made use of is the gravity of the body in weight, that is, as opposite from
denying (and thus affirming) gravity by ascent into the air, the weight of the body in
going with gravity, down.”115 In essence, he utilizes the modem use of gravity to
support the vertical demands of his movement choices. Cunningham chose to merge
two ideas from ballet and modem, the body’s recognition and utilization of gravity
112Copeland, 6. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 77. 115 Merce Cunningham, “The Function of a Technique for Dance,” inMerce Cunningham: Fifty Years, ed. Melissa Harris with a chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 66.
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and weight in movement and the turned out leg of ballet as two formal tenets of his
technique.116
Though it may look “balletic,” Cunningham’s verticality is the reflection of
one of the fundamental tenets of his movement, the focus and development of the
spine, not on the achievement of a certain elongated, vertical “line” as so desired by
the ballet world. “Cunningham’s verticality, the importance his technique places on
the back rather than the torso, the speed and complexity of his footwork - all of these
elements are more than just knee-jerk repudiations of that “love-affair-with-the-floor”
which virtually defined modem dance at the time.” 117 Noel Carroll and Sally Banes
note other differences between Cunningham and Graham: “In opposition to the
technique of the Graham style, Cunningham’s movement is light. It is directionally 118 flexible and often rapier fast, covering space both quickly and hyper-articulately.”
Indeed, speed and lightness are qualities often associated with Cunningham’s work.
“Reviewing Cunningham’s very first solo concert in New York in 1944, Edwin Denby
noted that:
. . . his instep and his knees are extraordinarily elastic and quick; his steps, runs, knee bends and leaps are brilliant in lightness and speed. His torso can turn on its vertical axis with great sensitivity; his shoulders are held lightly free and his head poises intelligently. The arms are light and long, they float.119
These qualities differ from those associated with the Graham world of modem dance
in the late 1940s.
116 Merce Cunningham, “Space, Time and Dance,” in Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, ed. Melissa Harris with a chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 66. 117 Ibid., 212. 118 Noel Carroll and Sally Banes, “Cunningham and Duchamp,” in Merce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 179. 119 Copeland, 212.
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Cunningham’s use of the turned-out leg, a balletic technical innovation, may
have been adopted to facilitate this speed and lightness, but it is not the only
connection to classical ballet technique. Jacqueline Leeschaeve notes after one of
Cunningham’s classes, “In the legwork, I saw a lot of quite classical degages,
developpes, extensions, leg circles ...” to which Cunningham responded with “Yes,
full up and extended up, but you see, what else would think of the way the knee
works?” 120 They both acknowledge certain types of classical movement are included
in his vocabulary.121 The only difference in the Cunningham technique from classical
traditions is that he utilized this “dexterity in the legs” and transformed it into a means
of spatial expression, as opposed to just an aesthetic quality.122 In addition to utilizing
the turned-out leg to facilitate speed, he uses it to expand the dimensionality of his
work as well. Instead of moving primarily up and down, his dancers cover a great
I deal of stage space through “large lateral movements.” These classical traditions
are evident in Torse, a work described by Melissa Harris as a representing
Cunningham’s technique in that it illustrates the directions of the body that are found
in ballet, and the sequences of foot exercises done in those directions.”124 In Torse,
Cunningham combines elements of extremely rapid legwork with varying speeds and
tempos with entirely separate movement combinations for the arms and head. He
states:
Torse is the first dance where I really took those elements and tried to use them all. I used the idea of the leg’s direction at varying speeds, at varying tempos,
120 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 63. 121 Ibid. 122 Tompkins, 255. 123 Ibid. 124 Harris, 197.
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in various kinds of phrasings; the body changing constantly with or against the legs. Also doing that in the air, jumping and changing the direction of the torso, which is the hardest thing to do. That’s what the material of Torse is.125
The level of physicality involved in this particular Cunningham dance is made
possible, in large part, by the balletic turned-out leg.
Another purpose for Cunningham’s use of ballet is its familiar line and
rhythmic structure; A structure that gives definition to modem dance. In an essay
written in 1952, Cunningham explains the differences between ballet and modem in
terms of how they keep form in space, and how the codified stmctures of ballet may
contribute to a better visual interpretation of modem dance:
In ballet the various steps that lead to the larger movements of poses have, by usage and by momentum, become common ground upon which the spectator can lead his eyes and his feelings into the resulting action.... This also helps define the rhythm.... In modem dance, the tendency or the wish has been to get rid of these ‘unnecessary and balletic’ movements, at the same time wanting the same result in the size and vigor of the movement as the balletic action, and this has often left the dancer and the spectator slightly short.126
Cunningham relies on certain visual cues inherited from classical forms to act as a
guide for his audience. 177
Evidence of Modem Innovations
By 1945, less than a year after his first solo concert, dance critic Edwin Denby
noted strong modem values in Cunningham’s work.
125 Ibid., 63. 126 Harris, 66. 127 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 17.
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Mr. Cunningham reminds you that there are pure dance values in pure modem technique. He is a virtuoso, relaxed, lyrical, elastic like a playing animal... He has a variety of drive and speed which phrases his dances; and better still, an improvisatory naturalness of emphasis which keeps his gesture from looking stylized or formal128
There are multiple reasons that Cunningham has become more closely identified with
modem as opposed to ballet. The first reason is that he was an ex-Graham company
member, specifically one of the few men, and therefore more visible and quickly
recognized and associated with her company. The other clear reason is that he is
rarely associated as a ballet dancer or choreographer and claimed no intention of
starting a traditional ballet company. These two reasons, in tandem with the fact that
his work did not fall physically in any clear category, placed him in the modem
category early in his career. Although ballet was embracing some change, his
technique incorporated some elements that the traditions of the ballet world would not
accept as their own. Cunningham notes some of the limitations the classical ballet
world:
I have a feeling that what dance needed most was to open up new directions, to explore new possibilities, other than the solution to choreographic problems brought about by classical ballet, beyond the formulae and stereotypes of that tradition.129
Cunningham began to incorporate certain technical identifiers within his work which
associate him with the modem genre — specifically the use and reliance on the spine as
an origin of movement. The possibilities of movement expand and grow with the
physical understanding of the origin of that movement. For Cunningham, the origin of
128 Edwin Denby, “Edwin Denby,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975), 213. 129 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 130.
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movement is the spine. The spine is taken as the center of radius, a source for the
arms, legs and head, and any action or reaction by the dancer is sourced to the spine.
“Sitting, standing, extending a leg or an arm, or leaping through air, one is conscious
that it is to and from the spine that the appendages relate and that they manifest
1 TO themselves only so far as the spine manifests itself.” But the spine does not just act
as a point of origin; it is itself an important part of the movement. Cunningham
believed that “the spine acts not just as a source for the arms and legs, but itself can
coil and explode like a spring, can grow taut or loose, can turn on its own axis or
project into spatial directions,” in essence expanding the possibilities of movement to
1 T1 an even greater extent. One of his dancers, Gus Solomans Jr., a company member
from 1965 to 1968, noted this fact saying “He [Cunningham] uses the spine as another
limb, with equal articulation in all the joints of that spine, and reduces the center from
the whole torso to just the pelvis so that the spine• becomes free as a limb.”*132 Thus,
Cunningham looked to modem dance as a way to achieve his own particular
movement goals. The world of modem dance, in essence, allowed for assemblage
more so than the ballet world ever could. Within the classifier “modem” he could
incorporate balletic arms and balletic legs - use them inventively, change them, and
incorporate other outside influences - while simultaneously investigating non-classical
movement. In a sense, by allying himself with the modem dance world he could
130 Merce Cunningham, “The Function o f a Technique for Dance,” 61. 131 Ibid. 132 Carolyn Brown et al., “Cunningham and his Dancers,” in Merce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 237.
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explore more innovations in technical development even if ballet remained a core
element.133
Torse as an Example
Torse was first presented in Princeton, New Jersey, 15 January 1976. The
music for the piece is by Maryanne Amacher and set design is by Mark Lancaster.134
There are ten dancers in both the work as it was first presented and in the video
version, filmed in 1977.135 Torse contains elements of traditional influence, but Torse
also includes elements of innovation. In fact, the work looks at first like a classical
piece; the movement vocabulary almost seems to have been borrowed from a Ballet
101 class. The difference is that the emphasis on line is not “at all a classical ballet
line.” 136 Cunningham’s “line” typically differs from that of classical ballet in that his
is created by the articulation and manipulation of the spine. Torse explores the use of
the spine, its point of origin, how it changes movement possibilities, and how it makes
possible the exploration of multi-dimensionality in space.
Cunningham notes that in modem dance they use the torso and the back a
great deal, and in ballet they use the legs and arms a great deal and the back not so 1 T7 much. In his technique, he discovered a way to put the two ideas together. This
achievement is the specific physical question being answered in Torse. Torse, which
133 Brown, “Cunningham and his Dancers,” 237. 134 Harris, 297. 135 Charles Atlas, Torse, 55 minutes, (Seattle, Washington: filmed for the Jerome Robbins Archive, 1977), VHS. 136 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 20. 137 Ibid., 59.
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derives its name from the body part on which it focuses - the torso, is a study in the
five basic positions of the trunk utilized throughout the piece - upright, arch, twist, tilt,
and curve. In this work the movement is generated from the trunk, or the waist, but it
is made possible by the articulation, flexibility, and control of the spine.
Cunningham’s reasoning is that if the movement came from deeper in the body,
instead of just in the limbs or the joints, that the dancer may be able to move both the
back and the legs more quickly. Torse comes out of this• fundamental idea. 138
In watching Torse, one evident movement signature is that the dancers often
seem to be off-center, miraculously maintaining control in unexpected dimensions of
space. For example, Cunningham utilizes a repeated “highly propulsive off-center
jete, in which the dancers seemed to hurl their bodies in several directions
simultaneously, but remaining -this is key- supremely balanced all the while.”* 139 This •
“decentered-ness” is made possible by the control and manipulation of the spine. The
idea may at first seem contradictory, the development of a strong spine as “center” that
makes the “decentered-ness” of Cunningham’s movement possible. Significantly, this
is one of the defining elements of the Cunningham technique. It is also one element
which clearly separates it from the vertical lines and symmetry of ballet. The dancers
may often seem to be off-center, but it does not disrupt the continuity of the movement
or the alignment of the dancers, offering instead multiple new dimensions to the
movement and choreography.
138 Ibid., 62. 139 Ibid., 29.
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The exploration of multiple directions and dimensions in space is also
exhibited in Torse. This complexity in dimensionality is made possible by isolating
the origin of the movement - the spine - and controlling it, which in turn allows for a
freedom of movement from that origin that could not be achieved otherwise through
ballet. “Many choreographers think in terms of four directions: upstage, downstage,
left and right... Cunningham routinely utilizes at least eight.”140 Their heads tilt
backwards, ribcages pull to the lateral, legs and arms sculpt opposite directions —
choreography that seems to actively pull the dancer in too many dimensions to
maintain. Indeed, it is the seemingly impossible exploration of multiple dimensions
simultaneously inherent in Cunningham’s choreography which is a site of assemblage.
As Germano Celant states, “finding the limits of dance” has always been the impulse
that has distinguished the work of Merce Cunningham.141
Cunningham Technique is the Embodiment of Deconstruction
Cunningham’s technical assemblage offered a kind of truce between the
feuding entities of ballet and modem. When Cunningham began to choreograph,
ballet was located on the other side of a:
Virtual Mason-Dixon line that modem dancers were sternly instructed not to cross .... Before Cunningham, modem dance was so obsessed with the search for healthier and earthier ways of moving that its practitioners often dismissed the ballet vocabulary outright, demonizing it with adjectives such as ‘artificial,’ ‘mechanical,’ and ‘puppet-like.’142
140 Copeland, 30. 141 Germano Celant, “Toward the Impossible: Merce Cunningham,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 23. 142 Ibid.
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There was a “deep and rather bitter schism dividing ballet and modem dance” during
this time, and unlike today, there was practically no communication or collaboration
between the two entities.143 Cunningham’s technique, though not necessarily claimed
by either party, was an important first step in bridging this divide. It was recognized
as a reasonable alternative to both because it was respectful and aesthetically in line
with both. His “unprecedented fusion between balletic convention and the
curvaceous, sometimes convulsive, flexibility of torso and back we associate more
with modem dance” was the first step to mitigating the feud.144
As Cunningham’s technique developed, it became evident that the two
components - ballet and modem - were becoming effectively merged in his work,
resulting in an interesting effect. This effect is described most easily through the
deconstructionist term ‘arche-writing.’ Within deconstruction, ‘arche-writing’ is a
desirable condition which occurs when the origins of certain ideas or words are
questioned or held to critical analysis.145 First of all, like other terms within the theory
of deconstruction, “arche-writing is not a thing, a concept or a word which can be
defined; it is the pure possibility of contrast, of difference.”146 It is what makes
possible the play of difference. Derrida’s idea of “arche-writing” means whatever
exceeds those traditional ideas that have hitherto maintained the restricted economy of
language and representation. Christopher Norris describes the term as follows:
143 Tompkins, 254. 144 Ibid. 145 Peggy Kamuf, ed., A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 51 146 Jim Powell,Derrida for Beginners (Danbury, CT: Writers and Readers Publishers, 1997), 48.
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It is not a concept, as a word to which there must correspond to some fixed or definite idea, such that its meaning could in principle be exhausted by careful definition. Rather, it is a term that will come into play at certain crucial parts of Derrida’s text, those points moreover where something can be shown to escape or exceed all the bounds of classical reason.147
Peggy Kamuf writes that ‘arche-writing’ is a “semi concept” in that it is not so much
invented in deconstruction theory, as it is inscribed in the gaps of the theory. These
gaps offer the opening to differance, to the outside, and to an "other.”
Through the process of questioning the historical precedents of ballet and
modem traditions, then combining them to create a new entity, Cunningham
effectively dissociated both from their historical origins. In “re-assembling” the
elements of both vocabularies into his own, the origins of the movement are made
ambiguous. By complicating the origins of the two genres of dance, Cunningham’s
assemblage effectively makes possible an escape from presupposed ideas about how
dance movement should look. This idea ties back to Caputo’s idea of “cracking
nutshells” in that everything in deconstruction is turned towards opening, exposing,
expanding, and complicating. Cunningham’s technique is one step in achieving a goal
of releasing unheard-of, undreamt-of possibilities to come.149 What Cunningham has
done in his fifty-plus year career, is to always question, explore and find new insights,
specifically within his technique, which effectively broke down the boundaries
between two genres, creating the “other.”150
Thus, the technique effectively opened up a new way of looking at movement.
This pursuit of opening, of seeing something, such as dance, in a new way, is precisely
147 Norris, 93. 148 Kamuf, 5. 149 Ibid., 31.
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what deconstraction desires to do. In breaking down the barriers between genres,
Cunningham opens up a new way of looking at movement. In deconstructionist
thinking this is termed the “/ ’invention de I ’autre, or the incoming of the other, the
promise of an event to come, the event to the promise of something to come.”151
Deconstruction aims to remain constantly on the lookout for something unforeseeable,
1 M something new. According to Norris:
Deconstruction is the vigilant seeking -o f those ‘aporias’, blind-spots or moments of self-contradiction where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic .... To deconstruct. . . is therefore to operate a kind of strategic reversal, seizing on precisely those un-regarded details which are always, and necessarily passed over by interpreters of a more orthodox persuasion.153
Viewing Cunningham’s work through a deconstructionist lens allows us to
comprehend his revolutionary technique without relying on interpretations of
“orthodox persuasion” and in turn, find a new way of looking at movement. Even
given the history of how long Cunningham has been working within this technique,
the elements of innovation and exploration he holds as fundamental tenets constantly
change and shape the essence and the implementation of the movement. Cunningham
stated, “I think of dance as a constant transformation of life itself,” reiterating the
point that his technique is not a constant or immovable object, but one that is
constantly transforming as life takes hold of the dance.154
It is logical that the technique opened a new way of looking at dance
movement, because Cunningham’s himself looked at dance from a different
151 John D. Caputo ed.,Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 42. 152 Ibid. 153 Norris, 19. 154 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 77.
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perspective than his many of his contemporaries in the dance field. Just as the “the
grammatologist cannot avoid asking the question, “What is writing?” or “Where and
when does writing begin?” Cunningham is also trying to address similar questions in
reference to dance and movement. When Cunningham was asked to describe his
approach to dance, his reply did not include any mention of a specific, style, genre, or
technique, instead he responded: “The ideas of the dance come both from the
movement, and are in the movement. It has no reference outside of that.”155 And,
“Dancing, for me is movement in time and space.”156 Thus he addresses the difficulty
of talking about “dance” as a stable entity;
It’s difficult to talk about dance. It’s not so much intangible as evanescent. I compare ideas on dance, and dance itself, to water. Surely describing a book is certainly easier than describing water. Well, maybe ... everyone knows what water is or what dance is, but this very fluidity makes them intangible. I’m not talking about the quality of the dance, but about its nature.157
Significantly, Derrida notes that logocentric thinking stops the progression of the
questioning before their natural conclusion, “the responses generally come very
quickly, they circulate within concepts that are seldom criticized and move within
evidence which always seems ‘self-evident.’” In deconstruction theory, assumptions
are leveled and new ways of understanding are constructed. Similarly, in
Cunningham’s work assumptions about genre and technical vocabularies were leveled
to be replaced with new ideas about technique and genre.
155 Merce Cunningham, “Choreography and the Dance,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 42. 156 David Vaughn, “Merce Cunningham,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 96. 157 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 27.
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Though the classification of Cunningham’s work has interested the dance
world for as long as Cunningham has been creating work, these arguments of ballet
versus modem do not seem of great importance to him. For Cunningham, it is all
about the movement - the exploration, development, and investigation of the same.
When asked about the evident traces of ballet in his choreography in a 2002 interview
with the New York Times, Cunningham responded. "If someone puts her leg back
behind her and its straight, they say it's an arabesque," he said wryly. "I don't object,
because of course it is. My idea always has been that I want to use as much movement * 1 as I can make possible." Carolyn Brown, a longtime dancer and co-collaborator
with the Cunningham Company notes that the Cunningham style is less about a certain
style or era of movement but essentially a freedom of movement:
Merce has remained devoted to ‘dance movement’ - training the body to move with speed, flexibility, and control; to move with the sustained control of slow motion; to move free of any particular style. This devotion is perhaps most easily defined as a commitment to energy - not to ideas, to intellection, or even to perception, but to physical energy, expressed through the body moving (or still) in time or space.159
It is the not the classification of movement which is important to Cunningham, it is the
breaking apart of traditions and assumptions in order to explore movement
possibilities. Cunningham stated, “The human body moves in limited ways, very few
actually.... But within the body’s limitations, I wanted to be able to accept all the
possibilities.”160
New York Times, 24 July 2002. 159 Carolyn Brown, “Carolyn Brown,”Merce in Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975), 23. 160 Cunningham, “Choreography and the Dance,” 46.
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Conclusion
In this chapter we explored how Cunningham’s technique embodied certain
deconstructionist themes. His innovations together with traditional elements
transformed the way modem dance looked. Similarly, “Derrida’s deepest concern is .
.. to transform, to make something happen to the [French] language.. . . Derrida’s
work embodies and communicates a revolutionary desire to read and write texts that
‘in changing language, change more than language’ but at the same time also desire to
preserve memory and tradition.”161 This relates directly to what Cunningham has
done within the Western aesthetic dance tradition. Using ballet [tradition] and modem
dance [innovation], Cunningham has effectively created an innovative technique
heavily steeped in tradition while simultaneously igniting innovations through modem
dance. This idea reflects deconstmction, which is also simultaneously steeped in the
tradition and responsible to the philosophical influences which came before, but is
actively investigating and questioning those structures. Derrida speaks to this point in
an interview given in the mid 1980s:
It is fatal to dream of inventing a language or a song which would be yours - not the attributes of an ‘ego,’ but rather an accentuated flourish, that is . .. an intersection of singularities, of manners of living ... of what you carry with you, what you can never leave behind. What I write resembles, by my account, a dotted outline of a book to be written, in what I call - at least for me - the ‘old new language,’ the most archaic and the newest, unheard of, and thereby at present unreadable.
161 Nicholas Royle,Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), 34. 162 David Wood and Robert Bemasconi, eds.,Derrida and Difference (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 73.
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Thus, the technical language of Cunningham, which contains elements of both the old
and the new, effectively embodies core deconstruction concepts. It keeps ideas open
for exploration and makes definition impossible by constantly questioning the
boundaries between two genres, ballet and modern. In this questioning of movement
possibilities, Cunningham can achieve the unforeseen possibilities and unpredictable
results in movement. In his technical language, Cunningham demonstrates his
commitment to this idea.
Through his choices in technique, Cunningham reflects Derrida’s theory of
deconstruction with its constant disregard for closed definitions and the breaking of
old perceptions of what is acceptable in order to open up the ways we look at
movement. The point is not to establish Cunningham as a model of deconstruction,
that in of itself would be contradictory of deconstruction, but show that through
deconstruction a deeper understanding of Cunningham’s work can be obtained. In his
technique, Cunningham seems to do radical things in a rational way, which is, in
essence, a very deconstructive way of thinking. Cunningham breaks down barriers in
true deconstructionist style: by simultaneously maintaining respect for tradition - as
illustrated by his use of ballet vocabulary - and revealing and expanding the traditions
through modernist innovations.
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CHANCE
In the use of chance operations totally different ideas come up as to what can be done next.
Merce Cunningham, Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t
To define how Merce Cunningham revolutionized choreographic
methodology, it is important to begin with a description of the historical meaning of
choreography. Very simply, choreography is “The art of creating and arranging
dances or ballets.”1 It is the “primary organizing force behind dance” in that it
encapsulates all elements that dictate how the dance looks, feels, and is presented to
the audience. Technique is the foundation for choreography. Curiously, uninformed
of the art of choreography, the general public sometimes focuses on the technique or
performance qualities of the dance and fails to consider the intricacies of the
compositional method which created the dance.3
It is the choreographer, who even more than the dancer, has changed the
direction of “history, extending, transcending, and subverting the accepted idiom and
provides us with new visions of the human body in motion.”4 As the master of the
choreography, the choreographer essentially makes all pertinent decisions on how to
1 http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=choreography, 02/19/3005 2 Cobbett Steinberg, ed., The Dance Anthology (New York: Plume Books, 1980), 4. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 49
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“create and arrange” the dances. What makes Cunningham different is his reliance on
what is called chance methodology. By using this process, he has effectively made the
decision not to make decisions. Instead, he relegates the decision making to a wide
variety of procedures, such as flipping a coin or tossing a dice, which essentially make
decisions for him. This process, called chance methodology, is a radical innovation
within the dance field. It allows him to achieve choreographic results which open up a
new horizon of possibilities within movement.
Thus, Cunningham revolutionized choreographic methodology with the
introduction of chance techniques. In this chapter, we will first investigate what
exactly chance methodology is, how Cunningham came to be associated with the idea,
and how it manifested itself in his work. Secondly, by incorporating deconstruction
theory and language, specifically the idea of the ‘arrivant,’ we will describe how the
use of chance helped Cunningham execute new ideas within his choreographic work,
keep that movement alive and fresh, and to avoid unnecessary valuation of his work.
The pursuit of the ‘arrivant,’ or the other, is a desirable goal for both Cunningham and
Derrida. In the final section of this chapter, we will reveal how Cunningham has
effectively deconstructed the choreographic process by decentralizing the ‘central
term’ of choreography. The ‘central term’ being the use of personally motivated
decision making, typical in the choreography of the time period. Cunningham’s
successful deconstruction of the choreographic method has three positive results:
expanding his choreography beyond his own preferences and imagination, keeping
choreographic resources constantly in play leading to unpredictable results and
discoveries that he would not have made otherwise.
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What is Chance Methodology?
Chance methodology in Cunningham’s work, refers to his use of objective
mechanisms for making decisions in the choreographic process. In his past works,
these objective mechanisms included coins, dice, elaborate charts, the I Ching, and
even the irregularities of a piece of paper. They are used to make decisions about the
spacing or number of dancers, order of movement sequences, timing of the movement,
and which dancer performs. John Cage introduced Cunningham to this methodology
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he and other musicians and composers of the
period were experimenting with the process. Cunningham’s use of chance procedures
is also a direct result of his exploration in interdisciplinary collaboration, especially his
summers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, with Cage and others. It was
in March 1953, the spring after a summer spent at Black Mountain, when Cunningham
and dancers presented Suite by Chance, which is usually attributed as his first work
utilizing chance choreography. The work illustrates an early attempt at utilizing
chance methodology, though it is not offered as a model of this method, because as
Cunningham’s career developed and evolved, so did his use of chance methodology.
Frequently, the question of chance in Cunningham’s choreography is
misunderstood. The use of chance in choreography is not to be confused with
improvisation or indeterminacy. Unlike improvisation, his works choreographed
using chance are painstakingly created, dancers are given precise steps, detailed
choreography and spacing, and are expected to complete the movements within an
167 Carolyn Brown etal., “Cunningham and his Dancers,” in Merce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999)228.
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allotted time. Chance structures and procedures are very complex and reach definite
conclusions. Though the word “chance” seems to imply some sort of disorganization
or lack of structure, the exact opposite is true. “When Cunningham and Cage speak of
‘chance methods,’ their emphasis lies as much or more on the rigor of the methods as
on the randomness of the chance.”168 Though he occasionally experimented with
inserting instances of indeterminacy in his work, which is when dancers are allowed to
make certain choices of their own during the performances; Cunningham is typically
rigorous in his methodology and systematic in its application.169 His systems are
controlled systems and any chaos incorporated therein is explicitly designed as such.
You can roll the dice. It relieves your m ind.. . . But there's already so much chaos in life. You turn to art to escape it. Chance becomes its own order, if you choose to use it. Instead of planning a specific order, you use chance, and 170 out of it will come a new kind of order ...
Cunningham did use improvisation and indeterminacy, but into the overall process on
very rare occasion. Story, one of Cunningham’s few works that uses indeterminacy,
allowed for the dancers to improvise entire sections of the work with the idea that no
two night’s performances would be the same.171 Story was Cunningham’s first and
last attempt to incorporate this level of indeterminacy or improvisation. In his
dislike or distrust of improvisation, Cunningham shows a theoretical link to Derrida,
who stated in an unpublished interview in 1982 “I believe in improvisation, and I fight
168 Roger Copeland,Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 6. 169 Calvin Tompkins,The Bride and the Bachelors: Five masters of the avant-garde (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), 255. 170 David Vaughn, “Preface,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Melissa Harris with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York; Aperture, 1997),7. 171 Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance, directed by Charles Atlas. 90 minutes. Coproduction of Thurlean/WNET, INA, LaSept ARTE, BBC, and NPS, 2000, DVD. 172 Vaughn, 7.
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for improvisation, but always with the belief that it is impossible.” 171 Judging from
Cunningham’s short-lived career using improvisation, we can assume that he agrees
with Derrida’s statement. It is also important to note that Cunningham’s use of chance
varied from work to work. For example, his repertory ranges from dances which are
strictly choreographed through chance and rarely vary from evening to evening, to
dances in which, though the movement is set, may be changed slightly through chance
procedures during or between performances. There are even dances which are
structured through chance, but in which the dancer is allowed the freedom over the
course of the performance to execute in their own time, all while staying in the same
time frame as the other dancers and musicians.174 Steve Paxton, who danced with the
company from 1961 to 1965, said this of his expectations and misinterpretations of
Cunningham’s use of chance:
The thing that surprised me the most about working in the company when I started . . . what surprised me was that we didn’t all sit around and throw coins. I had expected that we would all do that, and what we did was come and learn steps.175
Cunningham’s use of chance methodology is due, in large part, to his artistic
collaboration with musician John Cage. During his time at the Cornish School, 176 Cunningham met Cage, who was visiting the school as a musician. When
Cunningham moved to New York in 1939 to dance with Martha Graham, he and Cage
continued to develop their artistic partnership. “Cunningham has said that he ‘counts
173 Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 85 min., Zeitgeist Films Ltd., 2002, VHS. 174 Merce Cunningham, “Choreography and the Dance,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 43. 173 Brown “Cunningham and his Dancers,” in 227. 176 Cunningham, “Choreography and the Dance,” 37.
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his beginning’ from the joint concert he and Cage gave in New York in April
1944 ”177 Jhis eariy interdisciplinary association, a partnership between music and
dance, explored and developed aesthetic ideas that would eventually shape
Cunningham’s approach to composition. David Vaughn notes that while both
Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance procedures in their work: “Cage
carried them through to the process of realizing a work in performance, but
Cunningham has preferred to use chance not in the performance of his choreography
but in its composition.” 178
This collaboration grew in subsequent years to include other musicians, artists,
and dancers who not only shared Cunningham and Cage’s interest in the exploration
of aesthetics, but also their neighborhood. Carolyn Brown can be described in many
ways - the wife of composer Earle Brown, longtime dancer with Cunningham’s
company, important collaborator and founding member of the company, and a friend
to John Cage and Cunningham. She notes that during this time period she and her
husband often shared ideas with Cunningham and Cage, about what they were
working on and their various experiments with their art.
We saw each other and talked about the ideas that were going on - over supper and between going to movies on 42nd street.... The excitement then - because I was living with a composer - was in the ideas about indeterminacy and chance that Earle and Morton Feldman and John [Cage] were involved in, and each of them contributed something of his own. I think Merce listened a lot; as I recall he didn’t join very much in the aesthetic discussions, but I think he was very influenced by them.179
Vaughn, 7. 178 Melissa Harris, ed., Merce Cunningham in Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York; Aperture, 1997), 7. 179 Harris, 71.
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She was right. In an essay written in 1994, Cunningham specifically notes his
partnership with musician John Cage and the development of chance choreography as
two events which, in turn, led to larger discoveries •within • his • career. » 180 Roger
Copeland also notes the eventual importance of this relationship, stating that “under
the influence of his chief musical collaborator, John Cage, Cunningham has
introduced the dance world to utterly iconoclastic ideas about the role that ‘chance
operations’• can play in« the choreographic process.” 181
But it was specifically the summers that Cunningham and Cage spent at Black
Mountain College, in North Carolina, that formalized and enhanced the creative
relationship. From as early as 1948, Cunningham and Cage were experimenting and
exploring chance methodology and other creative collaborations in the sheltering, non-
judgmental environment of the summer programs. As other artists joined them, the
collaborative environment grew and developed. According to Cage, events of this
“summer also allowed for a collaborative exploration within a welcoming, non-
judgmental, and educational environment; For example, it was at Black Mountain that
Cage was first introduced to Rauschenberg’s all white paintings, which gave him the
courage to compose his “silent” piece, 4’33”. 1 89
But the summer residency that was to be of “momentous importance” would
be that of 1953.183 In the summer of 1953 Cunningham was joined at Black Mountain
by some of the dancers he was training at the time - Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber,
180 Merce Cunningham, “Four events that led to large discoveries,”Merce in Cunningham, ed. Melissa Harris, with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 276. 181 Copeland, 5. 182 Harris, 68. 183 Ibid., 72.
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Anita Dencks, Paul Taylor, and others - and together they rehearsed and Cunningham
created a whole repertory of work. These works, including Banjo, Dime a Dance,
Suite by Chance, and Septet, significantly, marked the inception of the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company. 184 Though Cunningham may “count his beginning” • in ♦ •
1944, 1953 was also important because it marked the formal formation of the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company and the formal introduction of his choreographic work
which strongly relied on chance methodology. The first public performance of Suite
by Chance was in March 1953 at the Festival of Contemporary Arts, in Urbana,
Illinois. In a lecture-demonstration later that year at the Brooklyn Institute of the Arts
and Sciences, Cunningham “explained the hows and whys of both the dance and the
music ... By tossing coins he decided what movements went where and in how many
counts. Mr. Cunningham got the idea while watching the chance relationships of
people in the street, through a high window.”185 Furthermore, he explained, “the
structure is very classic: the first movement was andante, the second very slow the
third a little faster, and the fourth was very fast.”186 It was one of the first of
Cunningham’s works to be completely constructed through chance methodology. He
said of that work:
I subjected everything single thing to chance. I made a series of charts of everything: space, time, positions, and the dance was built for four dancers going from one of these lists to the other.187
186 Merce Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, ed. Jacquline Leeschaeve (New York: Marion Boyars Ltd., 1985), 90. 187 Ibid., 90.
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Though the movement in the work was as “unadorned and flat” as Cunningham could
imagine them, the charts had still taken several months of several hours daily to
i on complete. Remy Charlip, a dancer with Cunningham during this period, describes
the chart system for Suite by Chance:
These charts, which defined the physical limits within which the continuity would take place, were not made by chance. But from them, with a method similar to one used in a lottery, the actual continuity was found. That is, a sequence of movements for a single dancer was determined by means of chance from the numbered movements in the chart; space, direction and lengths of time were found in the other charts . . . many movements, to be found in the charts, do not appear at all in the final choreography.189
Originally, Cunningham intended the Suite by Chance to be performed in a non
proscenium performance space.190 Allowances were later made to adjust the work to a
wide variety of different venues, as is true with many of Cunningham’s works.
The early reception of Cunningham’s work was mixed. Lincoln Kirsten,
founder of the New York City Ballet, said of Cunningham “I am personally very fond
of Merce and admiring of John, but I think they are self-restricted to an audience
which is both blind and deaf to the orthodoxy and apostolic succession of four
centuries.”191 One reason, as suggested by Jennifer Dunning in the New York Times, is
his “use of abstruse-seeming chance procedures as a central creative device, which
gave his work the randomness of a throw of the dice.” 109 A second reason was that
most dance audience members during this time period belonged to one of two
orthodox groups, modem dance in the Graham tradition or ballet, “united in, if nothing
188 Harris, 69. 189 Ibid., 70. 190 Ibid., 76. 191 Lincoln Kirstein, “Lincoln Kirstein,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975) 89. 192 New York Times, 24 July 2002.
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else, a detestation of everything Cunningham and Cage did and stood for.”193 While
Black Mountain College provided a safe incubation for Cunningham’s early work, as
he became more and more a public figure, his choreographic choices would come
under greater scrutiny. Though many visual artists and musicians of the time period
shared these opinions, his ideas were not shared by his compatriots in the world of
dance.194 “His [Cunningham’s] ideas were not unique, they were shared by friends;
composers (John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff); and painters
(Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, etc.), but it would take a few years until the
dance world became accustomed to and welcoming of the new choreographic
methodology.
Pursuing the ‘Arrivant’
Cunningham’s desire in using chance methodology is to open new possibilities
within choreography, much like he did with his technique, to challenge existing
paradigms and to search for the ‘arrivant.’ Both Derrida and Cunningham share a
common goal, the pursuit of the ‘arrivant.’ Deconstruction theory reveals a desire to
explore new possibilities and to glimpse the unanticipated experiences which exist in
the future. Cunningham uses chance to, according to James Klosty, a Cunningham
scholar and archivist, "draw possibilities to him from beyond his reach, and to arrange
his materials, like iron filings [to a magnet], into relationships he might not otherwise
193 Harris, 72. 194 James Klosty, “Introduction,”Merce in Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975), 11.
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have seen."195 It is this quality, the active search for and anticipation of the
unanticipated future, which illustrates a relationship between Cunningham to
Derrida’s deconstruction theory.
What exactly is the ‘arrivant’? It is a deconstructionist term used to describe
what is next, the future, or what is to come beyond the horizon of expectation. The
goal of deconstruction theory is to discover what is to come, what is next, the future -
but not in a finite, definitive way. 196 There is an anticipated factor, the unnamed
‘arrivant’, which is always lurking just beyond the horizon, on the outside, and
belongs to those who have not yet ‘arrived.’ 107 It is the pursuit of, or the anticipation
of the arrival of the other, that encourages the deconstructionist thinker to focus on
keeping oneself open to the new experiences awaiting you in the future. But it is not
to be confused with some kind of “final coming,” some kind of messianic or religious
idea, because within deconstruction there is no end to possibilities of any kind. 1 OR
Derrida’s idea here is not to imply a definite “horizon of possibility,” or that there is a
finite arrival of some kind of completed state in the future.199 Derrida writes that:
’The arrivant’ must be absolutely other, an other that I expect not to be expecting, that I’m not waiting for, whose expectation is made of a nonexpectation, an expectation without what in philosophy is called a horizon of expectation, when a certain knowledge still anticipates and amortizes in advance.200
195 New York Times, 24 July 2002. 196 John D. Caputo, ed.,Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 123. 197 Ibid. 198 Ibid., 157. 199 Ibid., 157. 200 Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 6.
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Through deconstruction, the realization of this arrival is discovered and
simultaneously left open for a new and constantly evolving future.
The pursuit of the ‘arrivant’ leads one to realize a future creation which cannot
be anticipated or predicted according to current expectations. Derrida continues:
The arrival of ‘the arrivant’ or the ‘absolute stranger’ is made possible by opening up a different way of making the artefact (by way of differance for example.) This new deconstructive artefact differs from those available to us now by virtue of the lack of demand for its actuality to be determined in advance.201
Here is the link to Cunningham’s use of chance methodology. Cunningham has
essentially created a “different way” of making dances by opening possibilities in
composition using chance. The new way of making dances is how Cunningham can
more successfully pursue the ‘arrivant.’ As stated earlier, the goal is not to reach the
horizon of expectation, but to constantly pursue it in order to achieve unforeseen
results. Derrida acknowledges that ‘it is practically impossible to think the absence of
a horizon of expectation,’ all the same he insists on the necessity of remaining as open
as possible to the radical alterity of others. “An artefact of the other as arrivant leaves
open the greatest space for the possibility of a ... future to come.”202 Possibilities are
open to Cunningham through the processes of chance.
Another way Cunningham is evidenced in pursuing the ‘arrivant’ is an active
incorporation of chance, not in the initial compositional process, but to reenergize
existing works. When Cunningham began to know what to expect in his dances, or
existing works became predictable and stale, he would change sections using chance
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to keep his choreographic work new and fresh. If his dancers appeared to become too
comfortable with a passage, he might subject that portion to chance procedures to
change the tempo, spacing, or orientation. In this instance, chance is used to achieve a
goal of newness, or to keep open the horizon for unanticipated events. One of the
recognized problems with repertory is that the work risks taking on an overly
rehearsed and understood quality, which Cunningham personally found unsupportive
of his movement goals:
When the dance is new (even if it’s in a familiar idiom, a classical ballet), when the dancers don’t know it, it often has a kind of awkward life, like a colt. For instance, unfamiliar ways of going from one thing to another, both dancer and choreographer have a chance of finding out something. The instant it gets known it loses its life.203
Yalda Setterfield felt that “there were places where he [Cunningham] desired chaos”
and when there seemed to be a lack of chaos, he would utilize chance methodology to
reinsert it.204 Here, the term “chaos” is referring to the desirable, uncontrollable,
newness of a work, where there is still an element of anticipation to what comes next
or how the dancers would interpret the movement. Cunningham uses chance to
reinvigorate and reenergize works currently in repertory. The idea of chaos though,
according to David Vaughn, is in effect acting to create order in Cunningham and
Cage’s work. 90 S Cunningham is reported as stating “chaos is chaos only if you think it ♦
is• chaos.” 9 0 6 Thus, within • » a chance piece, ♦ two seemingly ♦ incongruent • ideas• can
happen simultaneously - formal construction and elements of surprise - because
203 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 127. 204 Brown, “Cunningham and his Dancers,” 228. 205 Vaughn, 7. 206 New York Times, 10 May 2003.
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007 chance results in “unforeseen ways of placing the phrases in space and time.”
Through this vision, Cunningham can “ . . . reconcile precision and the
unpredictable.”208
The use of chance also works to open a play of differences within
Cunningham’s work by keeping his resources constantly in flux. In doing so, the end
result is never entirely clear from the beginning, an idea that Cunningham both desired
and sought. That is, if Cunningham were to use choreographic methods that relied on
his personality or previous movement choices, then he would have a pretty good idea
of what to expect from a new work. In deconstructionist thinking - he would know
what the horizon of expectation was and what it would look like choreographically.
But by inserting chance methodology, he keeps the horizon of expectations at bay
because he really has no idea what will occur. The constant flux of his choreographic
methodology forces him to investigate unknown areas and new ideas. Cunningham
said that “In life we see suddenly that all sorts of things we thought were stable are not
at all... in dance as well, that has always influenced me: how to place yourself in an
unknown situation and then find a solution, a way out... of course that requires
unconventional procedures.”209
Cunningham said that Untitled Solo, one of the earliest dances to utilize chance
choreography, “... absolutely rearranged my idea of what coordination was, or mine,
certainly.”210 He also notes that “there were all kinds of things that we thought we
couldn’t do, and it was obviously not true, we could do them if only we didn’t get the
207 Vaughn, 8. 208 New York Times, 24 July 2002. 209 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 131. 210 Ibid., 80.
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mind in the way.” These unforeseen difficulties within the choreographic process
were not discouraging to Cunningham, but instead offered unique opportunities for
additional exploration. With chance, it is impossible to foresee or control the end
result. It is also more difficult to defer to personal preferences such as one’s likes or
dislikes in the process, even further masking the end result. Cunningham once noted
in an interview that he is often asked the same question in workshops with students:
“What if something comes up that you don’t like,• what do you do about it?” * 2His 1 1 *
answer is that he has to accept and deal with what “came up” in the process even if it
seems impossible to do so. “It’s like necessity being the mother of invention,” he
states. “You come to a necessity, you make it a necessity, so you find a way. You 212 have to be very strong and determined.”
Subverting the ‘Central Term’ of Personality
Through his use of chance methodology, Cunningham deconstructs the
choreographic process by eliminating the central term from the hierarchy of
choreographic process. Here, the “central term” consists of the personal decisions
which develop how the dance looks, feels, and is presented to the audience. Sally
Banes notes:
That emphasis on the personal in American modem dance made the course of its history entirely different from that of ballet... Modem dance was predicated so heavily on the personal, often intimate, formats, on subjective content and on individual quests for movement styles that would express not
211 Ibid., 81 212 Ibid.
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only the physicality of the choreographer, but also his or her thematic concerns and theories of movement ...213
That is, Cunningham matriculated during a time when a “cult of personality”
reined the art form. Modem dance in the United States during the time of
Cunningham’s early maturation as an artist, loosely the late 1940s and early 1950s,
was “beginning to look its age.... The political and artistic tumult of the early years
of modem dance had dissipated, neither the subjects nor the techniques of the dances
proliferating from the nest generation of choreographers were new.”214 Lincoln
Kirsten, a founder of the New York City Ballet and dance legend in his own right,
once “proposed that modem dance suffers from the ‘curse of Isadora,”’ implying that
one of the early founders of modem dance in this country, Isadora Duncan, began a
trend of personalization and individualization of movement. The movement
choices, vocabularies, and theories of the modem dance were first defined by their
founders based on their personal feelings on dance. For example: Graham, Limon,
Humphries, and others all created and codified their own individual movement
techniques, defined by their personal approaches to dance, hence the “cult of
personality.”
When Cunningham rejected the notion that personal decisions need to
dominate the choreographic process, he essentially deconstructed the central term. By
breaking down the elements of choreographic decision making - where do you place
the dancers, how fast do they move, or how many times do we do that movement - he
213 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (New Hanover, NH: Weslyan University Press, 1987), 5. 214 Ibid. 215 Kirstein, 89.
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result was that the central term was decentered and destabilized. As stated in chapter
one, the basic idea of deconstruction is to question structuralist ideas of the center,
raise questions, challenge traditions, undermine hierarchies, decompose and
decentralize structures. But to deconstruct something is not simply to show how a
marginalized element can be seen as central, the idea is to overthrow the central
element (in this process discovering if it is in fact deconstructable) to discover the
free-play of difference existing beyond the standoff between binary opposites.
Cunningham’s use of chance essentially overthrows the central idea of choreography
during the time period of the late 1940s and early 1950s and in effect decentralizing
the idea and opening the way for new possibilities in movement.
The problem with modern dance’s reliance on personal preference in
choreography is that Cunningham found it deeply limiting. By connecting dance
movement to and making it ultimately dependent upon the personalities and even the
actual physical bodies of the individuals who imparted it, the end result was
essentially predictable. John Cage comments on this problem in an essay published in
Dance Observer in 1944:
Personality is such a flimsy thing on which to build an art.. . . And the ballet is obviously not built on such an ephemeron, for, if it were, it would not present thrive as it does.... Essential devices for bringing this about have been handed down generation after generation.... The modem dance, on the other hand, is rarely clear . . . [modern dance] has no aesthetic (its strength having been and being the personal property of its originators and best exponents.) 217
216 Jim Powell,Derrida for Beginners (Danbury, CT: Writers and Readers Publishers, 1997), 153. 217 Copeland, 107.
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The idea is that by extending choices beyond the personal, a choreographer can
expand the possibilities of the movement they create. Cunningham, in escaping the
trap of personality-based choreography, allows for the growth of his choreography in
general. “A choreographer who relies solely on the resources of his or her own
personal way of moving is unlikely to produce a body of work as varied as
Cunningham’s.”218
Positive Results of Deconstruction in Choreography
In the previous two sections of this chapter, we have analyzed how
Cunningham’s use of chance results in the deconstruction the established paradigm of
choreographic methodology. This is achieved through two steps. First, we establish
that Cunningham’s use of chance is evidence that he shares Derrida’s goal of pursuing
a radically unforeseeable future, literally, the ‘arrivant.’ Cunningham is very
forthcoming with his goals in utilizing chance, but this is the first time those goals
have been shown to so closely link with the goals of deconstruction. Secondly, we
reveal how this goal is realized by Cunningham’s subversion of the ‘central term’ of
choreography - the choreographer’s personality. What follows are the positive results
that occurred as a result of this deconstruction.
To start, it is important to realize the general effect of Cunningham’s
introduction of chance methodology choreography. It effectively “jabbed as if by an
218 ibid.
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electric current” the whole world of gesture, the whole physical world in fact. 9 1 His Q
deconstruction had the desired effect of opening the future to new possibilities and
discoveries within his body of work. But, because Cunningham is a choreographer
and not a philosopher, many of his theories are connected and nuanced versions of the
same idea - movement. Thus, Cunningham’s use of chance resulted in three positive
and related results: that the movement choice was free from his own preconceived
notions and habits, that through chance Cunningham avoided unnecessary valuation of
his work, and that through these procedures there was a greater possibility for
additional discovery in his dance movement.
The first result of Cunningham practice of using chance procedures in his
dance making is that it keeps both his choreography and his movement choices free
and independent from his own preconceived notions and habits.220 Flipping a coin or 991 consulting the I Ching, keeps the artist from falling back on established routines.
Thus, the artist can expand the possibilities of their movement choices. Cunningham
spoke to this idea in an essay written in 1952:
When I choreograph a piece by tossing pennies - by chance, that is - 1 am finding my resources in that play, which is not the product of my will, but which is an energy and a law which I too obey. Some people seem to think that it’s inhuman and mechanistic to toss pennies in creating a dance instead of chewing the nails or beating the head against a wall or thumbing through old notebooks for ideas. But the feeling I have when I compose in this way is that I am in touch with a natural resource far greater than my own personal inventiveness could ever be, much more universally human than the particular habits of my own practice, and organically rising out of common pools of motor impulses.• 222
219 Merce Cunningham, “The Impermanet Art (1952),” in Merce Cunningham, ed. Melissa Harris, with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 87. 220 San Diego Union Tribune, 26 January 2003. 221 Ibid. 222 Cunningham, “The Impermanet Art (1952),” 86.
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Cunningham is essentially reaching beyond himself and his own personal preferences
to find innovative new solutions to old problems, both choreographically and
physically. In an interview in 1970, Cunningham says that one of the reasons he
began to use chance methodology is “to break the patterns of personal remembered
physical coordination.. . . I prefer to try whatever comes up, to be flexible about it
rather than fixed.”223 This independence allows Cunningham a greater range of
possibilities than if he were to rely on his own ideas alone. He believes that “to break
habits of mind and body through chance procedures is to discover freedom in
movement, which is not only emblematic of the ideal state of the individual, but is in
itself a powerful expression of that freedom.”224 Other choreographic methods are
perceived as “inevitably tainted by a multitude of elements - our own movement
preferences, trends, impulses, and theatricality - but through elements of chance the
choreographer can eliminate them.225 In 1957 he described the process in a lecture-
demonstration at Ann Halprin’s Dance Deck: “In my own work, wanting to find the
utmost in freedom from my own feelings, directly, or my memory of continuities and
ideas about how movement ought to follow one from another, I have used a chance
procedure to obtain the continuity.”
Second, adopting chance as a constituent condition of dance allows
Cunningham to escape unnecessary valuation of what he feels are meaningless
223 Cunningham, “Choreography and the Dance,” 46. 224 San Diego Union Tribune, January26 2003 225 Ibid. 226 Merce Cunningham, “Excerpts from Lecture-Demonstration given at Ann Halprin’s Dance Deck,” in Merce Cunningham, ed. Melissa Harris, with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 101.
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movement sequences. In utilizing an objective apparatus, he effectively denies any
positive (or negative) personal association from his “movements and gestures,
sequences and rhythms, and transforms them into indifferent objects.”227 By tying
movement to “autonomous processes, they become interior experiences of an
application of meaning that rejects aphysical solutions and consequently it is possible
to use any movement whatsoever, any sound, any image, any style.” And over the
course of fifty years, it has been this “open-mindedness” that has led his dance to pass
through all performance experiences.”229
Third, Cunningham prefers to use chance because it leads to new discoveries.
Chance methodologies are incorporated to make the process less reliant on the
choreographer’s own preferences. Though the use of chance does not prevent those
preferences entirely, and Cunningham does utilize chance in a variety of ways and to
varying degrees, it does act to keep resources in constant flux, and thus there is a
greater possibility for additional discoveries. Cunningham speaks to this point in an
essay he wrote in 1994:
I have utilized a number of different chance operations, but in principle it involves working out a large number of dance phrases, each separately, then applying chance to discover the continuity - what phrase follows what phrase, how time-wise and rhythmically the particular movement operates, how many and which dancers might be involved with it, and where it is in the space and how divided. It led, and continues to lead, to new discoveries . . . 23
227 Germano Celant, “Toward the Impossible: Merce Cunningham,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 23. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid. 230 Cunningham, “Four events,” 276.
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Conclusion
In this chapter, we examined how Cunningham and Derrida share similar goals
in their own individual worlds and how Cunningham realized this goal in his
choreography. By using his choreographic method as a practical example of his
theories on movement, we discovered that Cunningham’s desire, like Derrida’s, is to
find new possibilities and unforeseen results. Their goals are not to reach some
predetermined horizon of expectation, but to constantly pursue the idea of the future
because there in lies the unknown, the undetermined, and the unexpected.
Cunningham achieves this goal more so than any other choreographer of the time
period because of his unorthodox choreographic approach.
Cunningham’s use of chance methodology is related to Derrida’s pursuit of the
arrivant, because though not specifically identified as such by Cunningham, his
practice of subverting his own personal preference and leaving many choreographic
decisions to objective mechanisms is a deconstruction of sorts. The practice opens up
truly original ideas in movement choices. His dances deviated strongly from the
preconceived ideas about what dance was supposed to look like, how quickly it was
supposed to move, how it was internally connected, and even how long it was
supposed to be. All of these deviations were realized because Cunningham, in part,
removed himself from the decision making process.
Three positive results occurred as a result of his use of deconstruction:
Cunningham was freed from the restrictions of his own personal preferences and
habits, by keeping resources constantly in play the end result was never foreseeable,
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and the process lead to unanticipated discoveries. Cunningham, like Derrida, desired
to shift away from thinking of decisions in terms of an active act. Instead, the decision
was looked at as a moment of “non-knowledge” or an insight borrowed from fellow
philosopher Kierkegaard, “the instant of madness.”231 Derrida stressed and analyzed
the enigma of decision, the sort of mad blip of any and every decision anyone ever
'y i 'j made. In utilizing chance methodology, Cunningham successfully avoided a
potentially problematic issue related to decision making, reverting to old habits or
personal preference in choreography.233 The result of his unique application of chance
methodology in his choreography is that he creates dances that are unlike anything he
could have possibly anticipated, and it is what keeps audiences interested in his work
fifty-plus years into his career.
231 Nicholas Royle,Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), 5. 232 Ibid. 233 Lucy, 147.
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MEANING IS ALWAYS IN FLUX
I’m not really involved with expressing anything.. .. You allow the spectator then to make his own decision about it.
Merce Cunningham, Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn ’t
In chapter one of this study, we established the value and importance of the
intellectual relationship between Cunningham and Derrida, by demonstrating certain
theoretical synchronicities. Chapter two illustrated how Cunningham’s technique lays
a foundation to understanding this synchronicity. We showed how Cunningham’s
assemblage of traditional and innovative elements in his technique opened up a new
way of looking at dance. By folding together and questioning the histories of these
two entities, he opened up blind-spots or ‘aporias’ for looking at and understanding
movement. Chapter three, building from an understanding of Cunningham’s
technique, examines how he subverted the central term in the historic understanding of
the choreographic method, essentially deconstructing and destabilizing the relationship
between personality and choreographer. In this chapter, we will embark on a similar
evaluation of the relationship between the text and its reader, deconstructing the
relationship between the work [text] and the viewer [reader.]
Cunningham and Derrida are interesting studies on the topic of meaning
because both men, in their own way, reinterpret how the content of the work [text] is
72
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related to the viewer [reader.] The main idea that we will investigate in this chapter is
how both men effectively emphasize the separation between the creator and his work
with this separation eventually revealing the meaning ascribed. For Derrida, he shows
that meaning is constructed through the contextual fabric in which all text is located.
For Cunningham, the meaning of the work, if any, can be discovered through the
movement alone and his explicit explanation of such would be unnecessary. Both
men seem to recognize that meaning is a construction, that there is either no meaning
or too many meanings outside of the work [text] to even begin to direct the audience
to any one true meaning. The result is that neither ever leads his audience to
conclusions, instead he allows them to find whatever meaning they can by themselves.
This unique approach to the “meaning” of meaning puts into question the polemic
centers of authority, protests existing institutional views on where meaning should
originate, and investigates new possibilities in both literature and dance.
The following analysis investigates how the process of attaching meaning to
the physical or literate vehicle is essentially a commentary on the original and is
largely in the hands of the audience. This analysis will use two of Cunningham’s
works, Walkaround Time and Suite for Five, as examples to illustrate how
Cunningham allowed the audience to make their own conclusions about a work, and
how the inherent specter of narrative inevitably haunts the audience. Cunningham is
often credited for actively separating dance from literalness or narrative, but that does
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not seem to stop audiences, theorists, and critics from attempting to find meaning
within his work. 934
Understanding Derrida’s Concept of Text and Meaning
Derrida focuses on language; by what precedes or exceeds it, and how it is
constructed or deconstructed. His interest in language should not be interpreted as an
interest in writing per se - - e.g. books, novels, poems, fiction or non - - but rather an
interest in how that particular system was constructed and came to represent
expressive concepts. When we refer to ‘text’ within this study, we are using a very
specific version of the word as it is understood through Derrida’s theory of
deconstruction. “Text in the broadest sense is something that has been made or
constructed (a novel, a movie, a legal document a book of philosophy, etc.), implying
that there are other things in the world (being, justice, truth and so on) which have not 93S been made but just are.” His notion of ‘text’ is the conventional or normal
definition of the word combined with the displacement of that conventional
understanding. 936“A standard sense with a twist” according to Niall Lucy. 937
Defining Derrida’s meaning of “text” is, like all other deconstruction
terminology used in this study, difficult, multi-layered, and contextually reliant. The
idea of “text” begins with a ‘mark.’ Derrida’s use of ‘mark’ is to necessarily conjure
234 Calvin Tompkins, “On Collaboration (1974),” Merce in Cunningham Dancing in Space and Time, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 47. 235 Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 142. 236 Nicholas Royle,Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), 64. 237 Lucy, 143.
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images of animals marking territory, referring to a time before language. He prefers
this terminology because it “goes beyond all human speech acts.” Derrida stated in
a 1994 interview: “In the first place, the mark is not anthropological; it is
prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is everywhere there is relation to
another thing or relation to another. For such relations, the mark has no need of
language.” 9TQ But the language does have need of the mark as does the ‘text.’
Derrida’s notion of ‘text’ is not just the actual writing, the symbols, letters, and words,
but it is also carries with it the evidence of its constructedness and its reliance on the
fabric of context which surrounds it and from which it was created. Establishing this
system of inter-relationships is the first step in understanding Derrida’s intention with
the word text.
Text is figured as a system of these marks, or traces, or referrals which
effectively captures speech, life, the world, the real, history, and what ever else there is
to capture, in a differential network which is always changing, always recreating .240
This referential system is everywhere, in everything, and in every written word.
Derrida’s famous statement, “there is nothing outside the text,” means simply that
“you could never get to the point where something is no longer referred to something
else: there is nothing outside of context, that is to say.”241 For example, in chapter
three we defined choreography as “The art of creating and arranging dances or
ballets.”242 But in defining that word, we relied on the definition and contextual
238 Royle, 65. 239 Royle, 62. 240 Ibid., 64. 241 Lucy, 143. 242 http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=choreography, 02/19/3005
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relevance of all the other words used to describe it, even in the simplest definition
available. Every word is reliant on other words for context, meaning simply that no
’JA'I word can exist singularly; they are all wrapped in a referential system.
Traces or marks find meaning in this referential system in turn. But there is a
problem with this equation already because the referential system is always in flux, the
“structure is constantly caught up in a process that it does not control.”244 This ever
changing system underlines the deconstruction belief that there is no essential integrity
of language which associates it with truth. To wit, no word has only one meaning
attached to it across time, space, or culture.
Language and meaning are constantly shifting. Language is frequently riddled with paradox and logical aporias. It is often too vague to convey an objective meaning. It is Derrida’s task to expose the fallacies of universal meaning contained in writing and speaking. 45
But this constant shift in meanings is not to imply that words have no meaning. If
anything, it is quite the opposite. Derrida “thinks they have too many meanings, or at
least so many that no one could ever be their master.” 246
To assign meaning to a work is to ignore the inherent textuality which is
constantly at play. “Textuality is the play of meanings, or the play of differences, in
writing.” 247 In the system as described above, there is created an “irresistible force in
and between books, poems, phrases, verses, ideograms, hieroglyphics, etc” which
results from the referential• system at play between texts. It • is self-limiting • • • to try
243 Lucy, 143. 244 Royle, 66. 245 Roger A. Salemo,Beyond the Enlightenment (Westport CT: Praeger, 2004), 165. 246 Lucy, 128. 247 Jim Powell,Derrida for Beginners (Danbury, CT: Writers and Readers Publishers, 1997), 153. 248 Ibid.
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and trace the historical genesis, construe some kind of ideal meaning from the mix, or
to try and release “buried meaning” from within this system of textuality. Because
“textuality ... sees to it that we are at best able to put together certain unstable and
contingent unities of “meaning,” certain effects of the differential play of traces that,
with a lick and a promise, may get us through the day, that are only as good as the
work they do and only for the while that they do it.”249
Derrida thus implies that textuality limits our ability to render meaning from
gatherings of text. “Textuality is obsidonal,” he stated, “it is an undecidable process
of opening and closing that re-forms itself without letup.”250 It is almost as if Derrida
is saying that textuality is what makes deciphering difficult or at least perpetual,
confusing the reader with generalizations and reinscriptions of meaning.251 Yet
ultimately, that is the point of deconstruction. To keep centers decentered, to question
institutions, and to unseat hierarchies.
The idea is that these individual texts, in a larger system, carry with them a
“whole network of articulated themes and assumptions.” 252 “The point rather is to
allow language to disseminate ‘itself,’ to let meanings proliferate, to keep open as
many possibilities as it is possible to keep open at once.”253 Derrida wants
dissemination to happen. When these individual themes and assumptions meet and
link with other individual themes and assumptions, they generate new topics of
249 John D. Caputo, ed.,Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 183. 250 Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 136. 251 Ibid. 252 Christopher Norris,Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 26. 253 Lucy, 28.
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discourse.254 The desirable effect occurs when the play in meanings “seem to rise up
in a kind of illusory present and then fold under like a wave in an ocean” in a system
rife• with • textuality. • But to be clear, “dissemination is an attempt not to decimate
meaning but to lie bare the nominalistic contingency of what we call meaning, making
plain its constructedness and hence, its deconstructability.” It is precisely that
constructedness that Derrida tries to point out. The result is that the work is not led
blindly to “relativism; instead it opens the possibility of encounters with others,
including but not restricted to philosophy’s encounter with literature and vice
versa.”257
Meaning attempts to bind us. “It is Derrida’s contention that texts are
traditionally believed to convey a specific or particular meaning, but in reality they do
not. Thus, where it is assumed that language is capable of expressing ideas of the
author without changing them, this is typically not the case. What the author intends
to convey is subject to a variety of interpretations. Derrida’s style of reading
undermines basic assumptions about clarity of objective meaning. Furthermore,
drawing upon psychoanalytic theory, Derrida asserts that the author’s intention cannot
be uncritically accepted. There are many unconscious influences that lead one to
select one word over another, one tense in preference to another that might have
greater significance than consciously intended. The reader, not the author, becomes
an instrument for giving text meaning - - meaning that might be significantly different
254 Norris, 26. 255 Powell, 105. 256 Caputo, 183. 257 Lucy, 31. 258 Salerno, 166.
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from what the author consciously intended.259 With the idea of logocentrism, that is
the structuralism philosophical history which preceded deconstruction, God is the
author. What Derrida proposes with his theory of deconstruction is that we are all
authors, all gods, and “by working to undermine what is written, we create a world of
new meaning.... For Derrida, there is no God, no center, no truth, and no answer;
there is only the meaning we give to the word - through language.” He has given
the power of language back to the people, to gain liberation from the meanings that
attempt to bind us. Like Cunningham, Derrida has an endless desire for freedom. We,
the people, have the power to use language to wrench ultimate liberation from
meanings that attempt to bind us.
Cunningham’s Rejection of Explicit Meaning
Both Derrida and Cunningham questioned the construction of meaning,
believing that the overlay of context in both writing and dance was inherently a man-
made system, and in Cunningham’s case, unnecessary. For Derrida, it was the
investigation that proved interesting, to see how meaning is constructed and assigned
to text; and for Cunningham, it was the rejection of expressive meaning in his work.
According to Derrida, one of the conditions of deconstruction is “not to naturalize
what isn’t natural, to not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or
260 Ibid., 165.
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society is natural.”261 In his linguistic work, Derrida aimed to prove the
constructedness of meaning in language, to show the seams so to speak, and to reveal
that these systems are always in play, impossible to pin down, and that you can never
assign some kind of concrete, singular meaning to language or its products.
Cunningham approaches the question somewhat differently, but his approach can still
be understood more clearly through deconstruction. When Cunningham chooses not
to assign explicit, expressive meaning to his work, he essentially acknowledged that
any meaning he would assign would be false, constructed, and therefore untrue to the
work itself, in a word, unnatural. He stated in a 1970 interview:
The ideas of the dance come both from the movement, and are in the movement. It has no reference outside of that. A given dance does not have its origin in some thought I might have about a story, a mood, or an expression: rather, the proportions of the dance come from the activity itself. 262
It is from this place where we can begin our discussion of the role, or lack thereof, of
meaning in Cunningham’s work.
For Cunningham, the only subject of dance is dance itself. Cunningham’s
dances are never “about something” in a particular sense. He does not construct
evening length narrative stories, as in ballet, nor does he attempt to embody emotion
or expression as seen in many modem works. His work, very simply, is about the
movement itself. As Carolyn Brown eloquently stated in a recent New York Times
article, “For Merce, there has been no need, no wish to translate from some other
language. .. . His choreography is not about something, it is something. The dancing
261 Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 85 min., Zeitgeist Films Ltd., 2002, VHS. 262 Merce Cunningham, “Choreography and the Dance,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 42.
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is the story."263 There are no larger representational goals in his work, no
psychological, literary, or aesthetic goals to achieve in the movement; there is only the
body’s motion through time and space.264 In the movement language captured through
his choreography the physical is primary and non-reliant on the expressive overlay of
meaning that characterizes many of the techniques which preceded it.
Although his dances lack literary-style meaning, they are not completely
abstract. What Cunningham desired to do was separate his movement from the
construction of arbitrary meaning, not to completely subvert any kind of natural
context the movement of the body created. It is related to Derrida’s statement about
the natural, essentially, we should not assume that what is controlled and constructed
by history, institutions, or society is natural and avoid naturalizing what is not, in
actuality natural. For Cunningham, dancing is a “spiritual exercise in physical form,
and that what is seen, is what it is.” He continues:
In reference to the current idea that dance must be expressive of something and that it must be involved with the images deep within our conscious and unconscious, it is my impression that there is no need to push for them. If these primordial, pagan, or otherwise arche-typical images lie deep within us, they will appear, regardless of our likes and dislikes, once the way is open. It is simply a matter of allowing it to happen.266
Applying artificial meaning or adding expressive content to the dance would in fact
separate the movement from its inherent expression. Cunningham believes that “there
is really no such thing as abstract dancing, since the dance itself consists of the
263 New York Times, 05 October 2003. 264 Merce Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, ed. Jacqueline Leeschaeve (New York: Marion Boyars Ltd., 1985), 139. 265 Merce Cunningham, “Space, Time and Dance (1952),” in Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, ed. Melissa Harris with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York; Aperture, 1997), 67. 266 Merce Cunningham, “The Impermanet Art (1952),” inMerce Cunningham: Fifty Years, ed. Melissa Harris with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn, (New York: Aperture, 1997), 86.
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movements of the human body, which can never be abstract.” 9A7 In point of fact, as
Cunningham explained, “dance need not, and indeed, should not have a literary
meaning.” 268
In rejecting overt literal meaning in his work, Cunningham separated himself
from his early modem dance contemporaries. The late 1940s and early 1950s, the
modem dance world was very focused on exploring emotional content and expressive
meaning in their work. In 1953 Cunningham noted “it was almost impossible to see a
movement in the modem dance during that period [1950s] not stiffened by literary or
personal connection.” 9/%Q The overwhelming emphasis in dance of this period was
dance as a “psychological-symbolic” form of expression, created in no small part by
the followers of Martha Graham. It was her conviction that dance must be rooted in
an emotionally primal place, and in the early days of Cunningham’s career, most of
the modem world was still operating in this thirty-year-old vein. 970 But it was
Cunningham’s intention to leave this legacy of “imagined sentiment” behind. While
Graham conceived dance according to a representational vision, “cloaking every
activity on stage with expressive intentionality,” Cunningham longed to leave this
kind of illusionism behind. 971
Just because his modem dance contemporaries were involved in a personal
search for expression through movement, does not mean that Cunningham was alone
267 Melissa Harris, ed., Merce Cunningham, with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 44. 268 Ibid. 269 Ibid., 69. 270 Calvin Tompkins,The Bride and the Bachelors: Five masters of the avant-garde (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), 255. 271 Germano Celant, “Merce Cunningham and John Cage,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 80.
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in his “meaningless” choices. His contemporary, George Balanchine, choreographer
and founder of the New York City Ballet, was stunning audiences during this time
period with works that had no explicit narrative form. For example, Concerto
Barocco (1941), Balanchine’s first plot-less ballet, had no meaning beyond the score.
There was no set, no costumes, and no narrative structure. Thus, when Cunningham
decided to create “meaningless” style works, it meant that he had less in common with
the modem-dance choreography of Graham and Jose Limon than he had with the
neoclassicism of George Balanchine, who had made the New York City Ballet into the
“most advanced and most exciting ballet company in the world during that time
period..272
Let the Audience Decide
This comparison is not intended to extend any comparison between the ballet
and modem influences in Cunningham’s background. It is intended to give historical
relevance to what Cunningham was trying to do within the confines of the modem
dance world during this period. It was actually quite revolutionary. Audience
members accustom to watching performances with obvious expressive content or
reading program notes which spelled out the meaning of the movements on stage,
were left empty-handed in terms of explanation of what they were seeing on stage.
Cunningham encouraged the audiences to come to their own conclusions about the
work.
272 Tompkins, 255.
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In this way, the dance is viewed much like how philosophy or poetry is
viewed, where the power of interpretation is in the hands of the audience. These are
all worlds where whatever the words may be, they are all ciphers, meaning that their
meaning is not necessarily determined through context, but rather a sort of personal
creation to which reader himself gives force or value.273 Derrida gives the idea that
“Philosophical ciphers formalize natural language and tend to forge... a kind of chain
of security...• which occasionally makes these ciphers resemble the thing » itself.” • 97 4
Cunningham’s work intentionally avoids “making his thoughts speak,” turning the
conversation instead to the body, and letting it speak for itself. Almost as if the
ciphers in this case were the physical manifestations of the body as they appear on
stage. Cunningham makes no effort, or makes an effort not to make an effort, to
decipher these physical, graphic or visible signs for the viewer. Derrida explained that
“the graphic has a continuity of movement that cannot be rendered in speech, and it is
superior to speech, in that it in the physical understanding of a concept, something
new takes shape under our eyes, something which outshines the method which
commanded it to exist.275 Cunningham’s physical vocabulary is a simple, direct,
graphic vehicle. It is the undisputed visible, physical form which gives audiences a
less cluttered contextual landscape. For both Cunningham and Derrida, meaning is
formed not at the inception of creation, but through the journey of the work through
this landscape to the viewer or reader of the work or text.
273 Derrida, 136. 274 Ibid., 212. 275 Ibid.
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This is essentially a Dadaist sentiment. Cunningham never went so far as to
spell out a dance’s meaning for anyone, he believed in an ethos espoused by Marcel
Duchamp, that the spectator completes the work of art, that “it is for the spectator to
'ync make interpretations of the dances, or not.” Cunningham stated that “any idea as to
mood, story, or expression entertained by the spectator is a product of his own mind,
of his own feelings; and he is free to act with it.”277 In his book The Bride and the
Bachelors: Five Masters o f the Avant-Garde, Calvin Tompkins suggests that there
may be “a common design underlying the work” of Duchamp and Cunningham in that
they are both interested in breaking down the barriers between art and life.278 Their
attention is turned outward, as if to recognize that art as an end of itself is simply not
enough, but that the interaction between art and the world around it is what gives the
work passion and depth. By including the audience - almost demanding their
interaction - Cunningham and others create work which is inherently more interesting
than if their work had to stand as components alone. 970 The interaction with the
audience is actually a key element to any Cunningham work. By not applying any
explicit meaning to his works, he is allowing the complexity and volume of meanings
to come into play. This is not to assume that Cunningham wanted audience members
to leave performances with a specific understanding of his work, but as such, he gives
them that option.
276 David Vaughn, “Merce Cunningham,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 98. 277 Cunningham, “Choreography and the Dance,” 42. 278 Tompkins, 2. 279 Ibid.
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Cunningham specifically notes his interaction with Duchamp and other artists
in New York just after World War II. Not unlike the later collaborations Cunningham
would have with other artists at Black Mountain College, this time period provided
interdisciplinary influences which shaped his work in a distinctive way. It was a time
when many European writers, poets and painters came to the area, developed
friendships, shared neighborhoods, and sometimes collaborated on projects.
Cunningham notes that during the “war period” he saw the paintings of Max Ernst,
Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp and would sometimes go to parties at Peggy
Guggenheim’s where they would also be. He speaks to this time period:
That was a totally different world from the one that I knew through the Graham circle, and I expect that probably promoted me in some way to go and look at their work. Peggy Guggenheim had a gallery on 57th Street and I remember very often seeing shows there.... I began going to art exhibits. It’s funny because the American School of Ballet was on 59th St. and Madison Ave., and at that time the important galleries were on 57th St. so one could go to class and then go and have a look. I began to do that. 981
This chronological and geographical connectivity between Duchamp and Cunningham
is offered here as support to the more important intellectual relationship between the
two men. Both experimented with the idea that the artistic vehicle is only part of the
greater artistic equation. While Cunningham was experimenting with this concept in
one area of the city, Duchamp was working in visual arts in another, but the results of
the two were very similar. Duchamp once said, “The creative act is not performed by
the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by
280 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 44. 281 Ibid., 45.
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deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to
the creative act.”282
Walkaround Time as an Example
Noel Carroll and Sally Banes note the logical synchronicity between Duchamp
and Cunningham as well, specifically using the example of Walkaround Time. It
offers not only a kind of homage to Duchamp, but also one example of how
Cunningham’s work espouses no explicit meaning:
For all the speculations about analogies and disanalogies between Duchamp and Cunningham, there is a concrete historical connection between the two artists. The dance Walkaround Time was choreographed by Cunningham in 1968, with decor by Jasper Johns based on The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and with music by David Behrman titled ...for nearly an hour... The piece was John’s idea; Duchamp approved it; and it was Duchamp’s suggestion that during the dance those pieces of decor be moved into a relationship that emulated the painting.284
This work was created for nine dancers and was first presented in Buffalo, NY in
1968.285 It consists of two parts, separated by a short intermission. On the stage are
loosely scattered clear boxes of varying sizes, one which could easily hold three men
standing, and others that would barely fit one person curled in a ball. On the boxes are
silk-screened Duchamp designs from Le Grande Verre, including the Chocolate
Grinder, the Oculist Witnesses, the Sieve or Parasols, the Nine Malic Molds, the Top
282 Sally Banes and Noel Carroll, “Cunningham and Duchamp,” in Merce Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 180. 283 Banes, “Cunningham and Duchamp,” 180. 284 Ibid., 183. 285 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 210.
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Inscription or Milky Way, and the Bride.286 The dance opens with the entire company
arrayed on the stage, surrounded by the decor, saluting the work in an open-armed
knee bend. Several movement themes and qualities thread throughout the work;
running in place, multiple dancers imitating the rolling, turning and interlocking of
machine parts and gears, slow solos which involve intricate shifting of body parts on a
minute scale and then a large scale, slow motion runs. 987 The work is at times very
slow, reverberating with moments of incredible stillness and very little movement.
Then there are moments of enormous movement, when the whole stage is teaming
with life when the cast is doing the same movement together, in unison, through the
unison is never predictable and often breaks at odd times.
For the most part, Walkaround Time is as clear and expressionless as a pane of
glass.288 In the first section there is an exquisite solo by Carolyn Brown, performed
with inexplicable balance and poise through disjointed movement. She eases through
the movement, finding flow and continuity that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else in
the work. The typical Cunningham dancer is exemplified by the “beauty (but never
the superficiality) of surface: clean, sensuous, self-sufficient, rarely invoking inner
depths or hidden mysteries.”289 Here, Brown lives up to the definition, with what
seems like effortless embodiment of the movement and a certain kind of detachment
which is also typical of Cunningham’s company. Cunningham’s dancers are not
286 Banes, “Cunningham and Duchamp,” 183. 287 Banes, “Cunningham and Duchamp,” 183. 288 Robert Greskovic, “Merce Cunningham as Sculptor,”Merce in Cunningham, ed. Germano Celant (Barcelona: Italtel, 1999), 257. 289 Roger Copeland,Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing o f Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 37.
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dramatic, they do not appear “impelled by motivations.”290 Instead, their detached
demeanor and expressionless carriage facilitates the meaningless motif in his work. In
her solo Brown seems to supply another link to the Duchamp analogy, in that in her
machine like precision of the movement, she reveals nothing, not even strain. Thus,
the audience is left with a specter of beauty which is completely open to interpretation.
Then there are moments that beg for interpretation. For example, at the
beginning of the second half of the performance, Cunningham undresses and redresses
behind one of the installations, completely removing all of his clothing and then
putting it back on in a different order. Nudity in a dance performance typically
indicates some kind of message or meaning that the choreographer wants to relay, but
here Cunningham does not give it to us, it is left up to our interpretation. The only
thing he concedes is that the work is his homage to Duchamp and that the nudity in
motion is a reference to Duchamp’s interest in that subject (note Nude Descending a
291 Staircase.)
The only other option from which meaning could possibly be drawn is from
Cunningham’s choices in pairing. Cunningham typically relies on gender specific
pairing in his work, i.e. men lifting women. For example, in this work, there are two
instances when a female dancer runs across the stage, from upstage left to right, to
jump into the arms of a man who is patiently standing there waiting for her. She is
caught, released and then leaves the stage as rapidly as she arrived. There is another
instance, at the end of the solo mentioned above, where Carolyn Brown is gently
290 Banes, “Cunningham and Duchamp,” 180. 291 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 114.
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carried off stage by Cunningham. Both pairing situations tend to lend themselves to
interpretation beyond just the physical: Why a woman jumping into a man’s arms?
Why does Cunningham in particular carry Brown off stage? Gendered bodies in
relation and movement imply meaning to a twentieth century audience.
Challenges of Escaping Narrative
The example of Walkaround Time shows the many challenges and
contradictory messages found within just one of Cunningham’s works related to
meaning - does it mean anything, what does it mean? Audiences, both of dance and
literature, are typically on the lookout for a narrative. We are conditioned through
social constructs to expect and hopefully unravel the narratives in what is presented to
us onstage. When the choreographer or the author complicates matters by not offering
explicit explanation of the narrative, the audience often tries to create one. One can
look to the extensive efforts of audiences, critics, and theorist who seem to find
pertinent message or meaning in Cunningham’s work, regardless of his insistence that
there is none, as proof of the difficulty of escaping narrative or meaning in a
historically expressive art form. Derrida found the same difficulty in his work with
literary analysis. These two areas of focus are, some argue, inherently expressive.
What we need to understand is that it is not that Cunningham and Derrida don’t
believe in meaning per se, it is that they don’t believe in the author’s ability to
prescribe meaning.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cunningham believes in expression, but not necessarily in prescribed narrative,
or the practice of assigning predetermined meaning to that expression as it manifests
in the human body. His works are constructed to highlight the body moving through
time and space, not to tell a story, relay an emotion, or to be the vehicle for some
social or political message. Cunningham believes that gesture is evocative, even in
moments which are not intended to express something specific, human movement is
inherently expressive. There are moments, as described in the pairing sequences of
Walkaround Time, which are not intended to express something per se, but are
nevertheless expressive. Cunningham describes a similar instance in the work Locale,
first presented in New York City in 1979:
There’s a point in Locale... just in the beginning of the second part, where one of the men leaps towards a girl who’s on the floor; another man lifts this girl into the air, and another girl who’s been with the first man comes over and stretches her arms and body over him. It suddenly seems to be, again, not something expressive but something almost intimate in a way. But I just wanted a man leaping towards a girl who’s then pulled up by another man so it’s a continuous movement.292
Thus, even in the absence of explicit content, there remains the troubling specter of
content. It seems inescapable.
A similar problem occurs in the work Suite for Five in that in the work’s
construction, there seems to be a kind of narrative structure that we, as the audience,
anticipate and then create, regardless of the intent of the choreographer. The work
was originally titled Suite for Five in Time and Space and was first presented in South
Bend Indiana, 18 May 1956 with music by John Cage and set design by Robert
292 Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, 107.
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Rauschenberg. The work is made up of six parts with five dancers and each section
is separated by a darkening of the stage. Thus, the first element of narrative is created.
Because the work is so clearly divided into parts, the audience almost wants to read it
like a book. The first section introduces a man, dressed entirely in blue, who dances
an engaging solo full of weight changes and notably a repeated sequence of off-center
pelvis shifts moving upstage. The next “chapter” is a solo by a woman costumed in an
orange unitard, who proceeds to perform a solo which, like the man before her, has no
clear narrative structure, only the clear voice of the moving body. The next two
sections are a trio between two women and a man, and then a duet between the first
man and the second woman. The pairing and partnering in these two sections and the
final section of the work introduce a challenge to reading the work as entirely without
narrative because the male/female interactions in these sections are so familiar, from
ballet and other dance forms, that audiences have instant context for their
interpretation.
It is the way that Cunningham chose to introduce and then reconnect the male
and female dancers, that seems to send an explicitly gendered message to the
audience. “In Cunningham’s dances, instances of partnering become saturated with
polyvalent meaning precisely because they are not lodged in a narrative, as in sleeping
Beauty, or in some other poetic causal chain of events.”294 In the first and second
sections of the work, the dancers dance alone and without expression. There is not
even a clear movement motif to either of the works, much less a clear narrative. The
293 Ibid., 208. 294 Banes, “Cunningham and Duchamp,” 184.
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last three sections maintain the movement and performance qualities of the first two,
but also involve the dancers in relationships with other dancers. As an audience
member, this tends to complicate the visual understanding of the work and seems to
call out for explanation of what Cunningham intended to mean with the work.
What Cunningham intended to “mean” with the work has nothing to do with
narrative, meaning or any relevant comment on gender relationships. In a program
note for the 1958 performance, Cunningham writes, “The events and sounds of the
ballet revolve around a quiet center, which, though silent and unmoving, is the source
from which they happen.”295 There is no mention of the story of interpersonal
relationships which seem evident throughout the work, because that is not
Cunningham’s intention with the work. Any meaning drawn from the work is the
audience’s own. One of Cunningham’s comments on this work seems to illustrate this
point perfectly, “There wasn’t anything else, I mean in the dancing part - there were
ideas, but things happen only when you dance, you can go on talking forever.”
Thus, “Anytime one notes, and uses, for purposes of discussion, a scheme discerned in
a certain Cunningham dance, it must be viewed as a momentary convenience rather
than as a keynote concept.”297
Thus, in the absence of explicit narrative, Cunningham audiences, critics, and
archivists, tend to create a meaning where Cunningham himself explicitly intended
there to be none. This relates directly to the explanation of meaning in deconstruction
theory. Within deconstruction, there are too many meanings and they are always
295 Harris, 89. 296 Ibid., 92. 297 Greskovic, 253.
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changing and evolving, thus pinpointing one meaning for any one concept or idea is
impossible. In a Cunningham work, the same idea occurrs. Because he does not
prescribe one definite meaning to the work, yet acknowledges that the body and
gesture is inherently expressive, there is no end to the meanings which could be
prescribed to the work. In a recent documentary, Derrida also comments on the
challenges and problems with narrative:
And so the question for me is the question of narration . . . I’ve always said that I can’t tell a story. I’d love to tell stories, but I don’t know how to tell them. And I’ve always felt that the telling is somehow inadequate to the story I want to tell. So I’ve just given up telling stories . . . I’m not going to tell you everything, I’m just going to tell you superficial things ... we remain on the edge of an impossible confidence.298
Derrida offers us a specific understanding of narrative and the problems that it creates.
In a narrative it is impossible to say everything, both Derrida and Cunningham
recognize this fact, and so neither man ever tries. The jump, if there is one, to
narrative meaning is made by the individual audience members and is never
acknowledged by the creator.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have investigated the role of meaning, or the lack thereof, in
Cunningham’s work as explained through the text/reader relationship in Derrida’s
literary analysis. Within deconstruction theory, meaning is a constructed entity, and
because it is constructed using elements which are always in flux, it too is always
298 Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 85 min., Zeitgeist Films Ltd., 2002, VHS.
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changing. Meaning is self-referential and is inexorably tied to all other entities within
the contextual fabric of society. This interconnectedness begins to explain Derrida’s
hesitancy to ever give a final meaning for any piece of text. It is not that there is no
meaning to the text; it is that there are too many meanings circulating in the contextual
fabric to ever pick just one. To do so is binding. In assigning specific and permanent
meaning to text essentially limits the possibilities for both the reader and the author.
Limiting possibilities is viewed as a very negative quality in deconstruction theory
because it ascribes to the essentialist sentiment of ideal or fixed meaning.
When Cunningham’s rejects explicit meaning or narrative in his work, he
embraces a similar idea to Derrida’s in his literary analysis. Both men see the inherent
limitations and impossibility to assigning only one specific meaning to their work.
Instead, Cunningham opens an understanding both to his audience and to himself, by
allowing all possible interpretations to happen through his movement. His movement
is not abstract, nor is it de-humanized.
He never denies the human in his art.... The human physical presence is the dominant force in Cunningham’s work and it is not without emotive signification. The confusion perhaps lies in the unfamiliarity or novelty of the design of his work.299
Thus, by leaving open all possibilities, Cunningham allows the audience to take a very
important and engaging role in the work, to actually decipher, or not, the meaning for
themselves.
If the dancers dances - which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone
299 “Merce Cunningham and Company,”Dance Observer 25 (January 1958): 10.
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else’s dance - but if the dancer dances, everything is there. The meaning is there if that’s what you want.300
In essence, neither Cunningham nor Derrida denies that there is meaning in both text
and movement, rather that meaning is fluid, or for Derrida, constantly deferred. In
doing so, they open up a whole world of unimagined possibilities for interpretation
which would be unavailable if they were consciously decided for the audience.
300 Tompkins, 245.
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CONCLUSION
The mind will say you can’t do it, but more often than not you can, or you see another way, and that’s what’s amazing. In some cases it is impossible, but something else. Merce Cunningham
It was truly the beginning of a Zeitgeist. Yvonne Rainer, “This is the story o f the man who... ”
This study presents new possibilities for how to analyze and understand dance.
By evaluating the theories and works of Merce Cunningham through the lens of
deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, we engage in a new dialogue on dance theory and
philosophy. The result of this dialogue is not to prove that Cunningham himself, his
work, or choreographic method is somehow a model of deconstructive thinking, but
reveal that a philosophical theory can be used to gain a deeper understanding of his
work. In this study, we attempted to show logical connections and intersections
between dance and philosophy. There is a need for a different kind of dance analysis,
as argued by Roger Copeland that is “less descriptive and more interpretive.”1
Cunningham is a logical beginning for interpretive analysis because it is clear that
addressing the descriptive side of his work does not fully address what is actually
happening on stage. There is a sense that in addition to the physical movements, there
1 Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 19. 97
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is a larger theory on what dance can and should be at play. Arlene Croce explains, “I
thought, watching Merce’s dance, that I was being subjected to a theory about
dancing.” It is the theory that we are addressing here.
In review, first we analyzed how Cunningham’s unique technical vocabulary
formed a foundation for the process of deconstruction to begin. When Cunningham
created his technical language, he did so by folding together and overlapping
traditional and innovative movement vocabularies. This process creates aporias - -
‘blind-spots’ or logical contradictions - - which force viewers, participants, critics, etc.
to look at dance in a new way because the technique did not fall cleanly into any of the
preconceived stylistic genres of the time period. The technique could not be explained
using the standard logic or rules understood in the dance world, leaving audiences
unsure of how to understand the movement. Cunningham destabilized the base of
movement by creating an assemblage between two divergent stylistic genres. In a
way, the viewer is forced to choose between these two ways of looking at the
movement - - Is it ballet? Is it modem? - - even though the foundation for making that
choice has been effectively removed. The foundation (the Cunningham technique) of
our study is similarly flawed, and allows for the destabilization, decentering, and
deconstruction of all the ideas to come.
Second, it is Cunningham’s revolutionary choreographic method that further
illustrates similarities between his work and the theory of deconstruction. Working
from the already decentralized foundation of his technique, Cunningham successfully
utilized a choreographic method which acted to subvert the central term in
302 Ibid., 20.
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choreography, personality. In doing so he was further destabilizing the dance-making
process. The result is that Cunningham consistently gets surprising and unpredictable
results in his choreography, ones that are completely independent of his own personal
likes and dislikes. In this his work illustrated a shared goal between him and Derrida,
the search for the arrivant. Both men are focused on unforeseen possibilities, the
elusive horizon of the unknown. But Cunningham borrowed a method from the music
world and his friend, collaborator, and artistic partner, John Cage, to achieve it.
Third, we gained an understanding of the similarities of how each man thought
about meaning and context in their work. By comparing and contrasting Derrida’s
understanding of the text/reader relationship to Cunningham’s choreography/audience
relationship we discovered that the meanings of these contextual relationships are
always in flux. Meaning is everything and nothing all at the same time. It is an idea
that is consistent with the destabilizing trends shown through the examination of his
technique and choreography as well. There is a consistent message in Cunningham’s
work, if not a consistent meaning, and that message is extraordinarily similar to the
crux of deconstruction theory. That is, everything is permeable, even the most distinct
or clearly stated tenets or ideologies. By avoiding prescribed meaning in his work,
Cunningham maintained the permeability and synchronicity with Derrida’s theoretical
beliefs.
Thus, at the conclusion of this study, I propose that there is an understandable
synchronicity and intellectual symmetry between the theories of Cunningham and
Derrida. Furthermore, Derrida provides a way to look at dance in a new way, using
new criteria, new methodology, and new jargon. In doing so, we will hopefully gain
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new insight on what is happening on stage and within the dancing bodies themselves.
What began as simply noticing that the jargon and terminology used by both men
often was extraordinarily similar grew to become a full examination of their respective
theories and philosophies. In this process, it became clear that it is not only jargon
that is shared, but fundamental concepts related to the searching for new possibilities,
producing unforeseen results, and maintaining an open future.
Another result of this study is that we are now able to look at dance through a
different kind of lens, one that utilizes a deeper philosophical understanding of the
concepts at work. The connections and similarities between Cunningham and Derrida
provide a new way to look at dance. It must also be stated clearly that this study takes
only preliminary steps to examine this relationship and in no way pretends to have
fully investigated this matter. Using only three examples from Cunningham’s
technical, choreographic, and theoretical body of work leaves additional work for
future scholars to explore. There is a great deal more information, from both
Cunningham and Derrida’s respective bodies of work, that could be explored in more
detail and in greater depth.
Why Take the Risk?
There is a certain level of risk inherent in beginning a study that attempts to re
examine a body of work which has already been critiqued, explained, researched, and
clarified, both by the choreographer himself and related scholars. When Derrida said,
“Why should philosophy be reserved for professional philosophers?” there opened an
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opportunity to reengage Cunningham’s body of work in a new way.303 That being
said, it is still difficult to embark on an endeavor which applies philosophy in a way
that Derrida or Cunningham may not have ever envisioned. By placing two elements,
long familiar in their respective worlds, next to each other and finding unexpected
synchronicity in the comparison, an entirely new type of academic endeavor is begun,
one that suggests a perspective which may or may not find a positive response in
either world. In this study, we are trying to show similarities between two entities that
actively warn against the misappropriations of their theories. Thus, by even beginning
the study we are risking the violation of the principles of either.
The risk continues in another way. In understanding the similarities between
the two men, there is a final and particularly humorous one. They both say more of
what they are not, or what they rail against, than give any explanation of what they
are. That is, both Cunningham and Derrida clearly state what it is that cannot be done
with their work - - there is no meaning, there is nothing beyond the physical,
deconstruction is not a method or technique, etc. - - but with so many books written on
both and both being such interesting subjects, this seems like instructions that are
impossible to follow. So, there is a similarity in the denial of a similarity, if that is
possible.
Any attempt to define ‘deconstruction’ must soon run up against the many and varied obstacles that Derrida has shrewdly placed in its path. To begin with, at least, one can perhaps best proceed by way of a series of negative descriptions. Deconstruction is not, he insists, a method, a technique, or a species of critique. Nor does it have anything to do with textual interpretation.304
303 David Wood and Robert Bemasconi, eds.,Derrida and Difference (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 77. 304 Christopher Norris,Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 18.
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The same kind of sentiment can be found in writing about Cunningham.
Many people have said that it is impossible to write about Cunningham’s work - or in any rate to convey in words what that work is like. Cunningham himself likes to speak of dancing in terms of “facts” .. . there is a great deal of misinformation and misunderstanding to be found in the writing about Cunningham.”305
Though the barriers to misappropriating deconstruction theory are clear, as are the
risks in trying to explain Cunningham, it is a risk that is worth taking. The reason we
did not heed them is best explained by Niall Lucy,
There is no absolute or transcendental warrant that this way is ‘better’, then to uphold it is to argue for it, to engage in debate over it, to embrace what Derrida calls ‘the limitless risk of active interpretation.’ This risk involves the necessity of having to press against the limits of what it means to argue, to debate and to interpret, such that one may stand accused of being relativist, revisionist, apolitical - of having either ‘dangerous’ arguments or no ‘arguments’ at all.306
In this study, the goal is not to hold Cunningham up as an example of model of
deconstruction, nor is it to try and describe or convey what his works are like. We
have attempted to illuminate the theory of his work by finding similarities in another
philosophical theory that is intellectually relevant. Thus, we can avoid the warnings
issued by the two entities and focus instead on finding a new kind of argument to
supporting each. Thus, there is an inherent value to creating this kind of study.
Through this process we have opened up a new way of looking at dance and,
specifically, understanding Cunningham’s work. There is a logical intersection
between philosophy and dance; you just have to find the right subjects.
305 David Vaughn, “Preface,” inMerce Cunningham, ed. Melissa Harris, with chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 7. 306 Niall Lucy,A Derrida Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 5.
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Cunningham’s Legacy
Deconstruction is something that is always happening, it is not a concept that
replaces some other concept and waits patiently for the next regime change. It is what
happens, what comes to pass, and it is always happening. “Like it or not,
deconstruction is a happening thing!” Deconstruction is not a finite idea or a static
system. Much like the idea of the arrivant, there is no horizon of expectation which
deconstruction finally meets and then quits working. Thus, the point of this study is
not to take Cunningham’s choreographic work as an inert body and dissect and
immortalize. The point is to show that Cunningham is always moving, changing,
growing, expanding, morphing, and evolving. That Cunningham has acted as a
catalyst within an already happening system to instigate and encourage future growth
and development.
In looking back on the history of the postmodern period in dance, it becomes
clear that Cunningham’s technique, choreography, and theories on dance were
important catalysts in the development of movement. Cunningham is an individual
cog in the ever moving wheel of progress which we are examining and using as an
example. In holding Cunningham up as an example, we are not postulating that he
was the single catalyst for the movement, only that he was an integral one. If
deconstruction is a happening thing, desirous of development, growth, and pursuing
new horizons, then Cunningham’s role in the birth and development of the postmodern
307 Lucy, 5.
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movement is evidence of deconstruction at work. In the next section we will examine
how this is true.
What is the postmodern movement? The term postmodern was first used in
correlation with dance in the early 1960s. Yvonne Rainer started using the term to
“categorize what she and her peers were doing at Judson Church and other places ...
in a primarily chronological sense.”308 This was the generation which came after
modem dance.
Though they were especially conscious of their oppositional role to modem dance, the early postmodern choreographers ... recognized that they were both bearers and critics of two separate dance traditions. One was the uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon of modem dance; the other was the balletic, academic danse d ’ecole, with its strict canons.. .309
By the early 1970s the movement had developed its own aesthetics and style.
According to Michael Kirby, who in 1975 first published an issue of The Drama
Review devoted to the subject of modem dance, the postmodern rejects musicality,
meaning, characterization, mood, and atmosphere; it uses costume, lighting, and
objects in purely functional ways.310 After reading through this study, it is notable that
many of the descriptions of Cunningham’s work seem to be mirrored in the aesthetic
style of this new movement.
Every genre or movement has its beginnings, the forerunners and mavens;
Cunningham was a forerunner for the postmodern dance movement. Though he is not
considered a postmodern choreographer himself, he is acknowledged as having
“pioneered many of the innovations that set the stage for what’s come to be known as
308 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (New Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), xiii. 309 Ibid. 310 Ibid., xiv.
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postmodern dance” and “respected as a forerunner.” 311 Cunningham may have had a
role in instigating the movement, and even performed at some of the early Judson
Church performances, but the official moniker of postmodern would never fit. The
reason is partially chronological, but mainly because he was not interested in doing
some of the things the postmodernist were interested in doing. As Carolyn Brown
stated, “Merce opened more doors for succeeding generations than he himself was
willing to walk through.”
By the time of the emergence of the postmodern movement, Cunningham was
viewed almost as an institution within the dance world. He was gaining international
notoriety as well as a wide base of respect in this country. Thus, while the movement
was still in its infancy, Cunningham inspired much of postmodern dance by serving
both as an inspiration for further innovation and as an authority to be criticized. “As
early as 1962, after the first of the Judson Dance Theatre’s concerts, Diane di Prima
referred to choreographers David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, and Fred Herko as
‘working out of a tradition,’ and named the components of that tradition as their
having studied with Cunningham.”314 Cunningham’s influence shifted at this point,
from avant-garde figure to that of a respected authority figure from which the next
generation wanted to rebel. “It’s no coincidence that a number of the original
311 Copeland, 4; Sally Banes, Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 95. 312 Copeland, 4. 313 Sally Banes, “Judson Rides Again,” inWriting in the Age o f Postmodernism (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 207. 314 Banes, Reinventing Dance in the 1960s, 69.
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members of the Judson Dance Theatre (the principle spawning ground for postmodern
dance) had either studied with Cunningham or had actually danced in his company.”
Besides serving as authority from which to rebel, Cunningham somewhat
inadvertently served another pivotal role in the facilitation of the new movement.
Simply by allowing musician Bob Dunn to teach a composition workshop at his
studio, Cunningham gave vital assistance to a group that would come to be very
influential in the coming years. In the early sixties, Dunn, a musician then married to
Cunningham dancer Judith Dunn, began teaching a composition class at the
Cunningham studio. In this class, heavily influenced by the chance methodology
procedures used by Cunningham and John Cage, Dunn “set up a model for producing
dance cooperatively and cheaply that corresponded to similar activities at the time in
the poetry, film, and theatre worlds.”316 “The participants included such dancers as
Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, and Steve Paxton.”317 These classes
“led to the concerts of experimental dances at the Judson Memorial Church in
Washington Square, out of which grew the postmodern phase of contemporary
dance.”318 “The brash, iconoclastic energy and ambition of the event foreshadowed the
impulse toward physical and political liberation that captured the American
-5 I Q imagination in the sixties.”
315 Copeland, 4. 316 Banes, “Judson Rides Again,” 207. 317 Melissa Harris, ed., Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, with a chronicle and commentary by David Vaughn (New York: Aperture, 1997), 125. 318 Ibid. 319 Banes, “Judson Rides Again,” 207.
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Conclusion
In conclusion, in this study we have revealed that Cunningham shares similar
theories with Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. The relevance of this argument is
related to the future of dance study. By establishing important and relevant links
between philosophy and dance, the future of dance scholarship is deepened and
broadened. Likewise, it is important to see that Cunningham lies in between
modernism and postmodern, acting as a kind of catalyst between the two genres.
When future scholars study Cunningham’s work, Derrida’s work, or the work of
subsequent generations of dance, they can see the relevance of this type of work and
can use it to develop their own independent line of research. Cunningham’s legacy is
not only his extensive body of work and revolutionary theories on technique and
choreography; he simply changed the way that we think about dance.
The effort to spread the work, to influence others, has to do with power, or ego. Apparently it doesn’t interest me, or if it did, I don’t care anymore. For so many years there was no interest from anybody. We went on doing it as we could and presented it. Some people were interested enough, but there was no huge interest; so you become rather indifferent to success. 20
320 Merce Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance, ed. Jacqueline Leeschaeve (New York: Marion Boyars Ltd., 1985), 161.
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