Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Jacob's Pillow 2009

This is a more recent video clip from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
When I was watching this I enjoyed the idea of adding in dancers to a phrase of movement and allowing it to build up on its own. The movement was very powerful and it wasn't as slow paced and muscularly posed as much of Cunningham's earlier works. He still used his idea of overlapping and collage, which I very much enjoy. This piece was performed at Jacob's Pillow in 2009.

The Collage Aesthetic

Cunningham enjoyed using a collage aesthetic within his dances. He believed strongly in the unity of movement and fixed boundaries and enjoyed playing with timing and how bodies can form images with different positions. Collage represents his idea of overlapping  image over image and allowing it to form its own picture within a bunch of others.  Cunningham found that working with abstract body lines offers a lot of mobility and space to play with  his movement and this is why Cunningham's collage theory is what made him stand out among other modern day choreographers.







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Theory of Chance

Cunningham has been questioned multiple times if he has a structure behind his dances...

Using chance is something that Merce believed made his dances more organic and human orientated. Many viewers who have watched performances by Cunningham think that he gave his dancers a coin to toss before they went on stage and used that to improvise there performances. However, this is not the case. Cunningham still has a structure and likes to hold order like many other choreographers did, he just finds that when using chance in the choreographing process he can put movement in order without thinking into it. This allows the movement to flow into its own master piece and relays a different message all the time. Cunningham enjoys choreographing his movement to that of which a pedestrian could understand. Many question if there is any story behind his pieces and most of the time there isn't. Using chance allows the audience to build their own stories to play out in their minds and also helps create the pieces own drama.

Merce Cunningham--Beach Birds 1

This piece is one of Cunningham's most popular pieces. Connected to his other work "Ocean", Cunningham was inspired for these pieces by the work of James Joyce who was an author whose next book was going to be titled "Ocean". This authors writing really influenced Cunningham. The dance shifts from black and white to colored film. There is also much combination and recombination of dancers. Cunningham enjoyed having a lot of interplay between the dancers bodies and lines, not only there actual bodies but there costumes too.

John Cage

The collaboration of John cage and Merce Cunningham began at Seattle's Cornish Dance School. John cage being a poet, artist and composer and Cunningham being a performer and choreographer. The two began working together when Cage began to compose piano pieces for Cunningham to dance too and the partnership took off from there. They ended up touring together and when the Merce Cunningham Dance Company formed, Cage was assigned the position of musical director. Both believed in experimentation and they always left space within both their compositions for the other to add in their own material. Cage and Cunningham bonded their spheres together having a well-known artistic partnership and a loving life together.

Merce Cunningham- Channels/Inserts

This piece is known as one of Merce Cunningham's finest works. Originally made for film it was later altered for theater performances. The score for this piece was constructed by David Tudor. In this piece Cunningham wanted to use smaller movements to present the illusion of various things happening at one moment. "Channels/Inserts", presents the idea of unpredictability which Cunningham used very often.