Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Another aspect of Cunningham's art, which New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff has compared to the Cubist principle of collage, is the relation between dance and such other elements of performance as music and decor. Here too the principle of dance-as-dance-only is carried to an extreme. In preparation for a typical performance, Cunningham meets with the composer and designer and tells them the general tenor of the dance, but not its specifics; then all three work separately, combining their efforts for the first time only in actual performance...
Again, then, Cunningham's principle of elimination turns out to be affirmative and liberating: a respect for dance, and for music, and for visual art sufficient to trust the integrity of each as an independent entity, without the need to impose an artificial ordering. Perhaps this explains the paradoxical association between a choreographer who views neither music nor decor as a determining element of dance, and a succession of major composers (Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros) and artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns...
...Cunningham, a special kind of movement, but a special way of perceiving any movement, so any dance gesture is equivalent to any other. This dissolution of hierarchy, the refusal to impose any arbitrary order on the intrinsic patterns of movement, is reflected elsewhere in Cunningham's art. Tomkins has likened his use of the stage to "a continuum, an Einsteinian field in which the dancers relate not to fixed points...but to one another," and most Cunningham dances can be viewed to almost equal advantage from any angle. There is no hierarchy of dancers, either: they interact, in critic McDonagh...
...equivalence of all movement within a dance suggests another Cunningham principle, that any movement can follow any other movement. Cause and effect, "logical" progression, become irrelevant, here, as in the arbitrary simultaneity of dance, music, and decor, the processes of art overlap the experience of contemporary life. Cunningham explained in an interview last year...
...principle of contemporary experience, in Cunningham's view, is chance juxtaposition. The application of chance to choreographic presentation has been one of the most controversial, and misunderstood, aspects of Cunningham's work; but for him, this represents no mere whim for the outrageous but an honest attempt to reintegrate art and life. In Cunningham's dance, as in modern life, the subjective ordering of individual experience replaces objective structure and continuity...