Word: cunningham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cunningham's career has been devoted to an exploration of this "independent" potential of dance. It is a concept so radically simple that it has taken a quarter of a century for the dance world to realize that Cunningham, in the words of critio Don McDonagh, "was speaking the language of his creative time almost before the time was aware that a new choreographic language was needed." The achievement that the Cunningham company brings to Harvard is above all the divorce of dance from all elements but its own self-delighting process: motion and stillness, tension and release, weight...
...think basically it comes down to an appetite for motion...You just have to be interested in motion for its own sake," Cunningham has told writer Calvin Tomkins--but for all that, his art involves a number of corollaries to the essential belief. One is that such dance is by no means "meaningless": rather, it simply has no meaning beyond itself and what the individual spectator chooses to perceive. Elsewhere in his book "The Bride and the Bachelors," Tomkins quotes Cunningham as saying that "if the dancer dances, everything is there. The meaning is there if that's what...
...Cunningham's dances are by no means characterless, either. Characters develop intrinsically within the framework of the dance rather than by external predefinition. Individual Cunningham works reflect a wide range of moods from the disturbing power of "Winterbranch" to the high-spirited kookiness of "Antic Meet" to the hints of loneliness and entrapment in "Place." Cunningham's work turns out to be not so much a denial of meaning as a trust in implicit meaning and in individual perception...
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...
Particularly with regard to music, dance's age-old impetus, such an approach is startling: Cunningham's dance is set not "to" music, but "against" it. The two elements occupy the same time-period and physical space, but neither acts in response to the other. The musical background of a particular dance is not always the same, and even when it is, it functions merely as a "climate of performance," in Clive Barnes's words. As Cunningham has remarked, "the result is that the dance is free to act as it chooses, as is the music. The music doesn...