We watch movement, we hear music

This afternoon I saw the documentary film Cunningham about the revolutionary dance choreographer Merce Cunningham. He got his start as a dancer in the 1940s. He gathered his own company and rose to prominence in the 1950s. The film tracks his art to about 1975. He worked up to his death in 2009 at age 90.

A good chunk of the film is recreations of his famous works from the 50s and 60s by the members of the still existing Merce Cunningham Dance Company. These sequences showed off the work well, much better than archival film, though there are sequences of that too.

Cunningham didn’t like the label “avant-garde” though his dances were quite different from anything that had done before. Here’s one way to explain one of his innovations: the dancers’ motions are synchronized and we hear music, but the movement and the music have nothing to do with each other. At one point Cunningham said the dancers didn’t hear the music until the performance.

For many of the dances in the 1950s the music came from John Cage, one of classical music’s eccentrics. Cunningham and Cage were a gay couple at a time when it wasn’t easy to be that. The film says only that Cunningham and Cage wrote letters saying how much one missed the other.

This music didn’t have much of or any melody and didn’t have much of or any beat. It didn’t matter that the dancers didn’t dance to it. The dancers could also dance to the noise of passing traffic. Even without the music the dancers could move together, sometimes doing the same thing at the same time. Also without the music as a guide one could see the different emotions projected by each dance.

Cunningham talked about how he worked with the dancers. He didn’t create a sequence of movements that some generic dancer was to execute. He watched for what the dancer could bring to the dance. He was interested in the person as much as he was the movements.

I enjoyed the film. I also quite enjoyed the dancing, as strange as such dancing may seem. I guess I’ve gotten well acquainted with modern music so understand modern art and modern dance fairly well.