Chicken or Egg; Dancer or Choreography?

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In our MinEvent, four different excerpts are featured, from three different decades. When I first learned the choreography, it seemed all the same to me–put your arms here, add in a lower back curve, now tilt! The nuances of different dances were lost on me. It is only after hours of interaction and observation of the material that I have gained any real sense of the movement quality in each dance.

The earliest piece that we tackle, Canfield, debuted in 1969. The “skips” game that we play is one of the first appearance of chance games in choreography. Cunningham seemed to give his dancers much more freedom and choice in earlier works. Canfield, from action to length of duration, is dancer-determined. The game can go on for quite a while, or maybe no time at all, depending on the whims of the dancers involved. Even for Numbers (1982), when we asked Neil about extremely trivial movements (swing of the arms, position of the fingers), he would respond that he didn’t get a lot of direction for it. With many of us hailing from classical ballet backgrounds, it’s hard to wrap your head around the choreographer not having established the position of every cell in your body.

That freedom is also evident in Roaratorio (1983). After I learned my jig, I decided to watch a recording of Roaratorio and compare myself to the original dancer of that part. I was shocked by what I saw–it didn’t even look like we were doing the same movements! The dancer’s choice in terms of head movements, extremeness of tilts, and apparel vastly differed from what I was doing and wearing. How was it possible that we could–and had–interpreted the same notes and movements so differently?

By 1998’s Pond Way, though, the direction seemed to have gotten clearer, more precise, less dancer-determined. Right arm straight, left arm to the side, look, straighten left arm, arch up! Every moment had a direction, and there was less doubt about the position of every limb at every single second. Did Cunningham spend his first few years searching for a style that was inherent in each dancer? Is his later choreography indicative of his relative wealth of knowledge after having watched numerous dancers interpret his work differently? Did Cunningham become more and more certain of his style as the years went on? On a more personal level, am I supposed to emulate the original dancer of the role, or am I supposed to create something completely different and unique with the same set of movements? I wish I had the answers to these questions, but with the show coming up in less than 48 hours, I can sum up all my questions in one query that I will hopefully answer before performing on Friday:

Should the dancer influence movement, or should movement alone influence the dancer?