Part 1 of a 2-part series on Merce Cunningham's innovations in making and archiving dance, hosted by Patsy Gay, Associate Archivist at Jacob's Pillow. This episode features archival audio of Merce Cunningham and Sam Miller, former Director of Jacob’s Pillow.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Patsy Gay, our Associate Archivist, who will be your host for this two-part exploration of Merce Cunningham and some observations related to his own Archives.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, I think, I think that we’re capable of many more physical things than we think. I think that I've always thought that, I think that our minds very often just stop us. We say, “oh, we can't do that, or that's wrong,” or whatever. And so, years ago, when I began to do work with Chance operations a long, long time ago, even the very simple early things, which were incredibly complicated then, those two points always came up. You could say, “well, I don't like this,” or you could say “I can't do it.” And I decided to, I would ignore both of those things, and try it, and not worry about liking it or not liking it, rather to gain the experience of it. And I think about, I've held to that fairly well.
PATSY GAY: That was Merce Cunningham, groundbreaking modern dance choreographer, speaking from Jacob’s Pillow in 1993. Today we’ll be exploring the art and legacy of Merce Cunningham. This is a two-part program, and here in part one, we’ll be hearing from Cunningham himself.
Specifically, we’ll be listening to excerpts of a talk Cunningham gave over 25 years ago on July 9th, 1993 as part of the Merce Cunningham Symposium. This multi-part event was put together by Preserve Inc. and The Jacob’s Pillow Archives. Preserve was a dance preservation organization, now defunct, run by the late Leslie Hansen Kopp. The Jacob’s Pillow Archives was at the time a new program run by Norton Owen the, at the time, newly appointed Director of Preservation. That’s a title that he still holds today. And it’s thanks to the tireless work of Owen, The Pillow, and many others that the Jacob’s Pillow Archives continues to grow and thrive today, and that we’re able to dive into the past and unearth these words from the very beginnings of The Pillow Archives programing.
Sam Miller, who was the Director of Jacob’s Pillow in 1993, opens the convening with some remarks highlighting the importance of preservation for dance in general and for Jacob’s Pillow in particular. His words strike me deeply for how enduringly relevant they feel despite having been said over a quarter-century ago.
SAM MILLER: For me as the Director, I have tried to be extremely conscious of, of what has preceded me. And I think that any, any act you make, whether it's inviting someone to teach, or to learn, or to perform at Jacob’s Pillow really is an act of preservation in that it’s an act of perpetuation that goes, you know, into this landscape and lives on. And I think that in becoming Director four years ago and sort of talking about preservation it was my sense that preservation was the connecting rod that really completed the circle between education and presentation of the artists living and working in the community that I think is central to what we're trying to accomplish here.
PATSY GAY: Perhaps this humble podcast can serve for us today as an act of preservation through perpetuation too, as Miller suggests. Bringing the words of Cunningham forward a quarter of a century to have a new life and meaning as we engage with them today.
Merce Cunningham was an artist I deeply admired for his extraordinary creativity, his endless exploration, his breathtaking artistry, and his groundbreaking treatment of his archive and legacy. In this year, what would be Cunningham's 100th birthday, I am thrilled to be sharing this rarely heard archival document. Cunningham had close ties with Jacob’s Pillow. In fact, the 2009 Pillow performances of the Cunningham Dance Company were live-streamed to Cunningham on his deathbed. That was the last time he ever saw his Company perform.
In 1993, when the symposium took place, Cunningham was still actively choreographing and performing with his company. He had just recently begun working with the 3D modeling program and choreographic tool LifeForms, which he would use to a greater or lesser degree for the rest of his life. He spends much of the symposium discussing this groundbreaking computer software, which contributed to both creation and preservation. On the creation side, Cunningham used this dance 3D modeling program to make little virtual human figures move around on a virtual stage space. Literally choreographing in virtual reality. This is a far cry from the traditional choreographic method of a creator using his or her own body or the bodies of other dancers as the generative tools for movement creation. As you can hear, Cunningham was clearly having to justify to others this breach of hundreds of years of choreographic tradition.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: As far as I'm concerned, anymore, what is that, that the one interviewer said that he thought it was going to put dancers out of jobs and something about, wasn't it the frightening to have this, this kind of thing over you. And I said, on the contrary, it's absolutely marvelous. It opens your imagination out to other possibilities, doesn't stop you at all. It's only your mind that stops you because you think that way. That's why I say Petipa would have seen it immediately. He would have seen the advantage of this from the way he thought. This enlarges the way you can think like this. That's what I feel rather rather than it, it doesn't revolutionize anything, but it just opens it out again.
PATSY GAY: Here Cunningham draws from the field of photography to help explain the value he found in his experimentation with this new technology.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: I decided the way for me to learn, or to work with this was not so much about practicing like practicing the piano, but jump in and see what I could do even with my limited awareness of it then. What I could do to invent things with it because it seemed to me immediately, the figure, you can put in things you know. I have put in exercises that we do in class into the computer so they're in the memory so they can be brought up, but I prefer the idea of adventures. So I began to experiment immediately and found that that was most to my liking because it prompts, it prompted me to see other possibilities, which were always there, it's just that one didn't see them. I'm sure you've seen this in photographs. You see a photograph of a movement of some kind. And you realize, or at least to my eye often, I, I realized that the camera has caught a time in the movement that I've not seen with my eye. So I began to use that idea here of doing things that I didn't know about or wasn't aware of. So, of course, I would make up things on the figure sequences, short sequences, natural uses, I was learning how to deal with this, which of course, were impossible, so to speak physically, because the figure will do anything you put in. It will wrap a leg around the back of itself in a way that, that you may have seen in Vaudeville possibly. But what it always did for me and still does is to prompt you as to a, some different point about movement.
PATSY GAY: Since Cunningham was still choreographing dances to be performed by his company, the digital movements from his computer screen still needed to be transferred onto the bodies and into the minds of his dancers, which, as he described it, sounds complicated, but rewarding.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: We're working on a new piece for example. A number of the movements I've already put in the computer in a way, so I would have them, this is before I worked with the dancers. And it involves movement for the feet, which, movements for the feet, which are very quick, sharp and change their space. And then adding movements for the arms, not in relation to the feet. But so that it's a separate thing, not so, that so that, so that they are quite separate. For example, you maybe might have the right foot extended and then coming back, and that you can understand and you might think that the arm could be this way...
PATSY GAY: It’s hard to see in the video because the camera is so tight on Cunningham’s face, but it looks like he extends one arm to the front and the other out the side. For the ballet dancers out there, sort of a third position port de bras.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: But by using chance operations, which I do on the figure, you get a totally different arm movement which doesn't relate via your physical memory to what the foot is doing. I've worked this way a good deal before, but never quite in such a complex way as, as this is giving me the possibility to do. I think in the beginning, when we did it with the dancers, it was difficult, but I noticed they began to, to get them, to see what they are quicker. In other words, we are adding this to our experience, which is what for me I find the most interesting if I can add things that I don't know about. And if I can, in this, now of course, convey them to the dancers so that it, so that it becomes part of their experience then too. Then I think, that it, that’s what interests me.
PATSY GAY: It’s clear that for Cunningham LifeForms’ primary role was as an aid for dance creation. However, by creating in a digital space, using a tool on a computer, he could also save what he was making to a file and access it later. While not the main intention, the documentary nature of LifeForms did prove to be useful for Cunningham sometimes.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: The last dances we’ve made using the trackers, and there are about five or six now, or seven, I used the computer to, to put in the memory certain amounts of the material that are in the dances. There is a solo I do in the beginning of “Trackers,” a slow arm movement, solo mainly. And because I usually don't get time enough to rehearse myself, I be, end up at the last minute realizing I can't remember it. So I thought, “oh, I have it in the computer,” so back I went and brought it up and there it was. It's just waiting to do it. And it shows you something that you’d forgotten. And it’s there, you don’t have to translate, you see this figure doing.
PATSY GAY: This type of recording of movement for future access might sound trivial, but in the dance world it’s monumental. A play can be typed out into a script that anyone who knows the language can read, a piece of music can be scored into musical notation, which is an agreed upon standard, easily written and read with just a little bit of learning. For dance there is no easy, agreed upon method of just writing it down. Dance notation systems like Labanotation do exist, but only a small percentage of highly trained people in the dance field have learned the system enough to “write” a score or even “read” a score—interpreting dance moves into symbols and back again. LifeForms, by capturing movement over time on a 3 dimensional digital figure model, documents movement in a way that just looks like human moving bodies. And thus, the recorded dance moves can be instantly “read” by anyone. I can’t emphasize how groundbreaking it is, as Cunningham said, “you don’t have to translate it, you see the figure doing”.
Some of those LifeForms computer files still exist. Today, the Merce Cunningham Trust holds a collection of computer files from LifeForms and DanceForms, the subsequent iteration of the computer program. Thus for Cunningham, these computer programs are still serving a dual role: as former creative tool and current preservation mechanism.
Stay tuned for Part 2 where we’ll dive deeper into the issue of preservation, learning about the Cunningham Archives, and hearing from Cunningham and some of his collaborators on the role of documentation and embodied knowledge in an active dance company. But first, here’s a few choice words from Merce Cunningham to close out this episode.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: I just would like to say that I'm all for preservation, but for me, I like making them better.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, and of course, through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon - either online or onsite.