During one of Meg Harper’s visits to our rehearsals, she mentioned that she thought of Cunningham’s work as landscapes rather than narrative.  That statement really resonated with me, and I want to use this post to try to explore what it means to dance/perform within a landscape. How is it achieved?

Gertrude Stein has an essay where she describes the goal she is trying to achieve when writing plays is to create a piece of “landscape theater”, where time is not experienced as a linear function, but rather the audience is within a single frame of time and is presented with multiple small images making up a larger portrait.  She does this through use of repetition, abnormal use of syntax, and generally long strings of words that could be thought of as multiple incomplete sentences chopped up and spliced together.

I’d like to think of dancing Cunningham as reading Stein.  If you’ve ever attempted to read Stein, you know that the first attempt is nearly impossible.  Her work comes off as nothing but nonsensical words on a page that don’t add up to anything.  Its frustrating and difficult to get through and unrewarding. However, if you take the time to not just read the text, but listen to the text as it is being read, phrases start to pop out at you, patterns begin to be perceived, and while if no direct meaning is gathered, there is at the very least a haze of significance surrounding the work.  The beautiful thing about Stein is that her work allows for a sheer multitude of different readings to occur depending on how the reader chooses to interpret the words or divide the phrases within the work.

Learning Cunningham is like learning this long repetitive string of movement phrases with slight variations.  His choreography is difficult, and for all the technical mastery you need to execute it, it’s not pretty. You don’t feel graceful doing it.  But his work is legible in the same way that Stein is.  You cannot simply do the movement, you have to be seeing the movement as you do it, and only then is there an awareness that extends beyond the individual steps and hangs over the whole piece.  His work demands a heightened sense of dedication to the movement itself from the performer in order to make the work alive.