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Varisty Record--3-0 HARVARD LIGHTS LINEUP Cox Mark Howe Stroke Kevin Cunningham 7 John Pickering 6 Jeff Parker 5 Bill Chapman 4 Phil Lowry 3 Chris Kennedy 2 Don Harding bow Jon Adams...
...William Cunningham Providence...
Laura Dean is considered a "post-modern" choreographer. Although she and her peers carry forward many of Cunningham's ideas, they diverge from the master's path in significant ways. While Cunningham never directly collaborates with composers--occasionally his dangers do not hear the sound accompaniment until opening night--Dean for several years worked closely with musician Steve Reich, and now composes her own music. She's intersted in showing how dance and music connect at the deepest level: in the use of the physical self as instrument. Unlike Cunningham, who exploits the illusion of randomness by splaying dancers around...
Mathematics, rather than Cunningham's chance or game structures, underlies Dean's work. A frequent device is the repetition of sequences in units of arithmetical progression. For instance: 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. Dean systematically explores the stage space using the most basic configurations: circles of varying breadth, columns and lines, an occasional diagonal. Clarity, precision--some viewers would say transcendence. Like a minimalist painter, Dean discovers meaning in subtle variations and trans-formations of repeated units. They are simple units immediately accessible to perception: one section consists of spinning, another of jumps...
...funny thing is that recent Cunningham pieces have a similar look, the same precise repetition of unison movements. (As in music, repetition is a fundamental structural principle in dance--sometimes it's buried, other times exposed on the surface.) Why Cunningham, an older artist working directly from his own sensibility, has come to the same sorts of dance ideas as a younger generation of choreographers--which he in the first place inspired--is a puzzle critics seek to explain. Each era, each time has its invisible current--a pulse the significant artist fuses with...