Word: decorative
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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...
...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...
...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's phrase, with "molecular individuality." As with Cunningham's approach to decor and music, this too is essentially a respect for the integrity of individual elements rather than a surrender to anarchy. Carolyn Brown, long an outstanding Cunningham dancer, points out that "the dancers are treated more as puzzles than works of art: the pieces are space and time, shape and rhythm...
...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...
...decor and stage props accompanying a Cunningham dance are often as inventive as the choreography. "Variations V" uses bicycles and magnetic wands, "Rainforest" fills the stage with silver helium balloons designed by Andy Warhol, and in "Tread" the dancers move behind huge electric fans blowing cool air at the audience. Cunningham's revolution in the conception of dance has been accompanied by a revolution in dance's stage environment...