Word: cunninghams
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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...
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...
...dance is concerned only with its own processes, then it cannot be circumscribed by definitions drawn from aesthetics, or history, or the other arts. For Cunningham, any natural movement is potentially the stuff of dance. To emphasize this, he often incorporates into his dances movements which have very little to do with traditional notions of dancing, such as the onstage change of clothes in "Walkaround Time." Movements which in isolation might appear clumsy acquire intriguing beauty in the context of a Cunningham dance: "I think dance only comes alive when it gets awkward again," he has said...
Just as "dance" is not, for 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...
...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...