The Analysis of Choreographic Concept in Merce Cunningham's
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THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA DOI number 10.2478/tco-2020-0008 The Analysis of Choreographic Concept in Merce Cunningham’s Creation Cristina TODI Abstract: Through this I intend to bring again to the attention of practitioners of stage, musical, choreographic and theatrical arts, Merce Cunningham’s contribution to the development of modern choreography. The constant searches of yesterday, today and tomorrow’s artists is and will be a priority for those who want to bring something new and revolutionize art. Today, we distinguish distinctly the phenomenon of transgression of borders between the stage genres, especially between theater, music and choreography. Choreography migrates towards theater and music and theater and music strongly infiltrate into choreography. This emulation intends to create a total show but can still give birth to some artistic experiments where the accent is placed on the very visual interpretation with an excess of body movement and with an acute absence of Thalia’s simple and natural truths. Cunningham’s proposal on the way of assuming the body, the space and the rhythm is another challenge for today’s choreographers. The way of using these aspects and of acknowledging the strange infinity of its possibilities of transcending the communication barriers, reconfigures the body of the dancer as a linguistic entity with values still unexploited. Initiator of the choreographic modernism, Merce Cunningham is still nowadays an important reference for young choreographers. Key words: choreographer, body, dance, modernism, rhythm, technique Lecturer PhD., George Enescu National University of Arts from Iaşi 117 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA Introduction The border of the 19th and 20th centuries is marked by a profound emulation of the arts of the show which opens the searches for new dynamic formulas of corporal expression. The modern dance or contemporary dance starts to project the image of a body released by rules and constraints, which defy the academic feature of ballet, representing thus the innovating, avant- garde element of choreographic art. These concepts of the new body, which exploit the movement by extrapolating the internal motility towards perception, transmutes the spectacular vision on the theater, as well. This new step, although it stays under the sign of the revolt, determines searches and reformulations of the corporal expression, searches which even today occupy a space almost dominated by artists from everywhere. In the contemporary period, the cultural space is invaded by modern choreographic shows. It seems that the whole society has now a major interest in artistic experiments. Probably this increased attention is the consequence of the increased appetite of the audience for dancing. There are proofs documenting my statements. From successful TV shows in which dancing occupies a generous space up to films with more or less famous actors performing brilliantly difficult choreographic pieces. For this purpose we remember the 39 films played by Shirley Temple, the miracle child of America, who still enchants today's generations; The Black Swan movie from 2010, where Natalie Portman played the main role in the psychological thriller directed by Darren Aronofsky, The White Crow directed by David Hare that brings us to the forefront of the biographical drama of the dancer in 2010 where, Natalie Portman played the lead role in the psychological thriller directed by Darren Aronofsky, or the last success that premiered at the end of the year 2018, The White Crow directed by David Hare which brings us to the forefront the biographic drama of dancer Rudolf Nureyev, being after two years still watched with a major interest by filmmakers. 118 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA Merce Cunningham Merce Cunningham (April 16, 1919-July 26, 2009), an American choreographer, by his real name Philip Cunningham, was born in the small Centralia town of Washington State. The passion for dance manifested itself early, surprising his family with the rhythmic precision of the steps taken. Despite the fact that he was born into a family without artistic affinities - his father was a lawyer and his mother loved travelling - it encouraged him in his choreographic career. At the age of 12 he began his dance studies with Mrs. Maude Barrett, a local teacher, whose dynamic style impressed his later creation. After graduating from high school, from 1937 to 1939 he attended courses at the Cornish School of Fine and Applied Arts in Seattle, where he became acquainted with a broad spectrum of arts. He studied alongside dance, music and theater. Although theater was at one time an option, dance offered him the possibility of ambiguity, of escaping from himself through movement and a form of exploitation of the space he felt he needed. An enthusiastic student, Cunningham relentlessly explored the limits of dance, and in the summer of 1939, he attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where he met a plethora of remarkable modern dancers. Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham were just a few choreographic personalities that impressed his later creative vision. A few months later, in December of the same year, he met young composer John Cage, a choreographer in the dance department at Cornish School of Fine Art. His move to New York in September 1940 was due to Martha Graham who invited him to work for her dance company on Broadway. For six years he was the soloist of the company, a period in which he began to create and of course, to interpret his works. His first solo choreographic concert took place in New York, in April 1944, with composer John Cage. 119 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA Although initially, Cage's music offered Cunningham only functional support, after 1950, they both began to explore the notion of chance, which they increasingly incorporated into their work. Throughout the partnership they had many discussions on the theme of dance and music and deciphered many similarities between the two arts. A major impact on the innovations that mark Cage-Cunningham's creation was the awareness of the common characteristic of music and dance, namely that they take place over time. This aspect opened many channels through which they approached art. The negation and implicitly the elimination of the consecrated idea of the music specially created for dance, led them to the separation of the two artistic genres. Fifty years of legendary collaboration had crystallized their ideas and unified their perspectives. In an apparent asymmetry - visible from the very beginning of the collaboration-, Cage's musical ideas are the matrix of Cunningham's research. Music performed by dance is such a revolutionary concept that even today it is difficult to discern how the implementation of this independence has been experimental and progressive. The aesthetic discourse is unexpectedly homogeneous, although it consists of an egalitarian autonomy devoid of convergence and divergence. The real foundation of the so-called temporal structure and rhythmic structure is the first of the two methods applied by the two artists for modelling dance separated by the musical aspect. But let us remember that these structural concerns stem from Cage's studies with Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music who sought to establish the laws of emancipation from dissonance. In this concept, Cunningham created five out of six solos for the 1944 New York show, being the first of several shows that integrated the idea of separating dance and music. For each solo, Cage and Cunningham adopted a common idea. For example, in Root of an Unfocus, the solo that remained in Cunningham's repertoire until the mid-1950s, the time structure is organized into three sections with varied rhythms: one and a half minutes, two and a half minutes and, respectively, one minute. Although the beginning and ending of each sequence are synchronous with the musical accent and 120 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA movement pulsation, Cunningham changes the speed and accent of the choreographic sentences and phrases without referring to a musical accent, without forcing any musical or choreographic details. Without the existence of a dramatic pretext, although it is speculated that it induces a state of fear due to the uneven and spasmodic rhythm of movements and the discontinuous use of space, its structure is based on the time factor. By analysing the expressiveness of Cunningham's movements, we notice that this does not come from the dramatic intensity of the choreographic elements, but rather, from itself, due to the ability to expand or contract the pure relation between space and time. The rhythm of the movement gets personalized accents depending on how each dancer manages their own physical and mental resources, and, by refining the internalized feeling of the performer's time, they manage to feel through the movement's pulse. The unitary aspect is curious, however, in the context of Cunningham's invocation of rhythmic structure in contrast to the temporal structure invoked by Cage. The latter highlights other acoustic parameters, more precisely, it releases the sounds of music, especially of the timbre from the relations systems that underlie it. Eliminating the criterion of rhythmic differentiation as an element of the composition and the interposition of multiple cultural filters prevents the musician and the listener from perceiving the intrinsic qualities of a sound. Let's remember that by the time he met Merce Cunningham, Cage had already made a name for himself in the musical arena. Although San Francisco from the 1930s to the 1940s was an area isolated from dominant music centers of that time such as New York or Paris, along with composers Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, he set up West Coast School, a unique percussion ensemble. In a community with modest openings to the arts, the percussion ensemble found a fertile ground and open to innovative proposals by young musicians, who, full of enthusiasm, interpreted numerous compositions.