Displacing ‘Humans’: Merce Cunningham’s Crowds

Dee Reynolds

‘A man is a two-legged creature – more basically and more intimately than he is anything else’ (Cunningham, 1997:86).

The impact of electronic technologies on the self-images of embodied human agents has produced both anxiety and fascination concerning the instability of the boundaries of the ‘human’. A front page article in the Guardian’s ‘Saturday Review’ section recently featured extracts from Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which describes a cyborg future, where, by 2029, ‘the majority of communication does not involve a human’, and by 2049, the ‘ubiquitous use of neural-implant technology . . . provides enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities’ (1999: 1-2). In the field of performance, explorations of interactions between ‘live’ performers and technology are currently stimulating debates about the relative importance of technological innovations and the human/emotional dimension of performance, which is sometimes seen as in danger of being eclipsed.(1)

In describing Cunningham dances, where, since the early 1990’s, computer technology has been employed as a choreographical tool, critics often use images drawn both from IT and from the natural world. Cunningham’s titles also point towards these sources, for example Beach Birds (1991), Enter (1992), CRWDSPCR, 1993 (named after 2 programme variants, ‘Crowd Spacer’ and ‘Crowds Pacer’), Pond Way (1998), and BIPED (1999), whose title is taken from one of the modules of Character Studio, the figure animation software created by Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut of Unreal Pictures.(2) Cunningham is currently enjoying a critical reception which at times borders on adulation. He celebrated his 80th birthday last year, but is regarded by a critical mass of choreographers, young and old, as well as by critics, as being at the cutting edge of new developments in dance. However, his early work in the 1940’s and 50’s, through to the 1960’s, frequently provoked strong opposition, and his recent work has sparked off occasional criticism reminiscent of the early days, particularly regarding its perceived lack of human emotion which can alienate some spectators. For instance, Tresca Weinstein commented in 1998: ‘What’s most chilling about Cunningham is the absence of emotion. His dancers move like well-assembled collections of body parts, powered by the force of nature or mechanics but without will or desire of their own’.(3)

From the very start, Cunningham set out, through movement, to discover new parameters of the ‘human’. This involved disrupting audience expectations of expressiveness and narrative content and structure, and dislocating familiar relations of the human body in movement to time and space. These assaults were frequently seen by contemporaries as attacks on the ‘human’ itself, particularly by contrast with the doyenne of modern dance, Martha Graham. Writing in 1968 of reactions to Cunningham in 1953, Jill Johnson said that ‘One of the key words was HUMAN. There was much discussion about what it meant to be human . . . they did feel, I guess, that Merce threatened the concept they had of what it meant to be human’ (1968: 21). In 1964, a critic wrote that ‘Graham is concerned mainly with human beings, with human relationships, the cause and effect of human behaviour. But . . . there appears not to be much inner content to [Cunningham’s works]; they seem superficial’ (Hutchinson, 1964: 621).

Cunningham enjoyed a personal and artistic partnership with John Cage from 1942 till the latter’s death in 1992, and the non-metrical structure of Cage’s music may have been an important factor in enabling Cunningham’s choreography to break away from dramatic structures of conflict and resolution, cause and effect, climax and anti-climax. Cunningham sees the famous ‘chance’ principle, inspired by the ‘I Ching’, and espoused by him and Cage, as having enabled him to transcend the limits of his individual motivations to discover new choreographical methods. His recent use of IT (as in the programme entitled ‘LifeForms’, since 1991, and motion capture, since 1997) is very much a continuum, as he has said himself, with his earlier chance methods, although the use of motion capture (seen in the dance entitled

BIPED, premiered in 1999), also raises new issues, which I shall discuss below. Moreover, the possibilities offered by television and its influence on our modes of perception are seen by Cunningham as central to his working methods. In 1977 he was quoted by Anna Kisselgoff as saying that: ‘One thing must not necessarily follow another. Or rather, anything can follow anything. We see it on television all the time. In the 20th century, this new continuity is part of the life we live’ (Jordan, 1999: 62). He continues to emphasize the crucial importance for him of the influence of television. Wired News reported recently that: ‘he told [Paul] Kaiser that he saw BIPED as working with the idea of television channel-surfing. This motif was apparent in the demonstration. Movement phrases are combined and recombined, and scale and pacing are in constant flux. The scrim in front falls into slowly falling lines, in sharp contrast to the dancers’ quick, irregular movements’ (Scarry, 1999a).

In 1952, Cunningham affirmed that ‘[the chance] method might lead one to suspect the result as being possibly geometric and "abstract", unreal and non-human. On the contrary, it is . . . no more abstract than any human being is, and as for reality, it is just that, it is not abstracted from something else, but is the thing itself, and moreover allows each dancer to be just as human as he is’ (1997: 87). The pithy dryness of this statement is typical of Cunningham’s pronouncements about his own work, which promote a strongly Zen-like or phenomenological view of his dance, highlighting the value of presence, of what he calls ‘"each thing-ness"’ (1997: 87). Cunningham also declared that:

I am no more philosophical than my legs, but from them I sense this fact: that they are suffused with energy that can be released in movement . .. that the shape the movement takes is beyond the fathoming of my mind’s analysis but clear to my eyes and rich to my imagination. A man is a two-legged creature – more basically and more intimately than he is anything else. And his legs speak more than they "know"’ (1997: 86).

In line with this reasoning, I shall suggest that Cunningham’s dances in fact philosophize in ways which point to consequences more radical than his intended anchoring in ‘the thing itself’. Allowing the dancer to be ‘just as human as he is’ does not assume a stable category of the ‘human’. Cunningham’s choreography in fact forces us to re-think relations, not only between space and time, but between intentionality and movement, the arbitrary and the purposeful, and even between what we conceive of as human and ‘other’ ways of moving, notably involving interactions with animal and computerized forms of movement. The effect is to destabilize – literally – and displace – literally – our received ideas of the ‘human’.

The markedly more positive reception of Cunningham’s recent work can be ascribed partly to a widely felt need to find, as Cunningham put it, the ‘complexity, not the confusion’, in our daily lives (Jordon, 1999: 62), but also to a pressing sense of the need to resolve the relation between the human and the technological in ways which can allow us to see a future for the human as we know it. Hence the delight of the critic Joan Acocella, writing in the New Yorker last year, having seen a Cunningham programme which included BIPED: ‘In the program as a whole, with the company dancing so feelingly against a background of electronic music and computer imagery, we witnessed a larger truce [than that between ballet and modern dance]. C.P. Snow’s "two cultures", technology and humanity, the machine and the soul: friends for a night!’ (1999: 84). Later in the review, she speculated that Cunningham may believe that there is a unity in the cosmos which we don’t know about, and also that many of his fans think the same. ‘Cunningham’s audience has always been extraordinarily fervent, and this may be in part because his work implies a faith that people can enter into and still sleep late on Sunday’(1999: 86).

Comments by critics leave no doubt that a large part of the attraction of Cunningham’s dance for contemporary audiences lies in its appeal to a kind of utopian imagination, rooted in the corporeal, in which the human intermingles with the natural (animal) and the technological. In fact, some critics even suggest that certain works by Cunningham transcend the human itself in a Zen-like, cosmic space, which has a meditative and reconciling effect. Beach Birds ‘offer[s] a vision of heightened reality . . . its creatures on stage are super-real’ (Kisselgoff, 1992). It is ‘a movement meditation on the sea from the shore side’ (Valis Hill, 1992: 57): it evokes ‘a sense of a peaceful world remote from human concerns’ (Sulcas, 1991: 27); ‘a palpitating serenity’ (Vranish: 1994). Similar comments have been made about Enter. ‘With Enter, Cunningham shows us the joy of duly experiencing the evanescent moment, the significance, rather than the meaninglessness, of being a mere grain in the sands of time, and the appreciation of death as an entirely natural element in the life cycle . . You come away from an encounter with such work lighter, freer, less trapped in your self, more connected to a cosmos that may be unfathomable but is no longer forbidding or alien’ (Tobias: 1993, 93).

Many critics are reassured by what they see as Cunningham’s privileging of the human over the technological, and their comments indicate a desire for a hierarchical synthesis, of the kind criticized by Derrida as a Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’ (sublation), where the ‘inferior’ side of the opposing binary is subsumed into a greater whole.(4) ‘For all of this computerized invention, Enter is a celebration not of technology but of the triumphant flexibility of the human mind and body to grow, change’ (Robertson, 1994: 73). ‘What both men [Cunningham and Tudor] seem to be saying [about Enter] is, "We didn’t make this piece." It’s untouched by human hands. Its mother was a microchip. And, as usual, with Cunningham’s work, the piece looks thrillingly human.’ (Acocella: 1993). Intersubjectivity is seen as taking on utopian dimensions. ‘The dancers [in Enter] strid[ing]on long, straight legs, take on the colour of heroes, members of some utopian society of the future’ (Jowitt: 1993). In CRWDSPR , ‘the 13 dancers look like a throng up there on the stage, and an idealized one at that. The dancers enjoy the companionship of others, yet define their own space. Individual and group actions happen simultaneously. The relationships between the dancers are in constant flux, yet there is never a sense of loss. Although the stage picture is buzzing with activity, every movement is clear, chaos without a mess’ (Goldner: 1994). CRWDSPR has been described as ‘Cunningham at his jolliest . . . It could have been rush hour on the New York subway. Yet it was much more fun, for this apparent chaos was both organized and cheerful’ (Anderson and Dorris, 1994: 795). By contrast, others find the automated character of some of the movement alienating and dehumanizing. ‘CRWDSPR . . . with its stiff, mannequin-like hands and robotic plastique, was almost oppressively anti-human. It’s Us vs. the machines, I thought, and the machines are winning’ (Harding 1994).

However, rather than continuing to operate with binary oppositions, conflicts and/or synthesis, such as that of ‘us’ and ‘machines’, Cunningham’s choreography can be said to displace fixed categories. Many critical comments on Cunningham in fact focus on the ‘undecidability’ of movements involving interactions between the ‘human’ the ‘natural’, and the ‘automated’. The dancers in Enter have been described as ‘not quite angels, but not quite human either. Something in between’ (Berman, 1994). ‘Enter . . . it’s like some natural phenomenon – a volcano, an ocean – except that we know it’s man-made . . . we might be watching the usually invisible processes of plant growth’ (Jowitt, 1993). According to David Vaughan, Beach Birds ‘evokes not only the movements of seabirds but also those of human beings, and even the placement of rocks on the seashore’ (Vaughan, 1995: 29). CRWDSPCR suggests both utopia and chaos, humanity and technology, in ways which undermine these oppositions. ‘There’s something festive about CRWDSPCR even though the dancers often look like windup toys running amok’(5) ‘[In CRWDSPCR] . . . The dancers travel with neat, sharp little steps, like androids going about their business in some sleek city of the future . . . Everybody seems to know where he’s going, and exactly how much time he needs to get there, and everybody is, one way or another, connected to everybody else’ (Mazo, 1994).

These processes of displacement can be described in Derridean terms as ‘spacing’, or ‘différance’, in which intervals or differences are insinuated within the self-relation of an apparently self-identical entity. Derrida describes spacing in dynamic terms: it is ‘a movement, a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity’ (Gasché, 1986: 200). It is both active and passive, since it is ‘not only the interval . . but also spacing, the operation, or in any event, the movement [my emphasis] of setting aside’. Spacing is not universal, in that its operation is different each time it takes place. At the same time, it is a necessary possibility. ‘As that according to which any entity is what it is only by being divided by the Other to which it refers in order to constitute itself, spacing is also the presignifying opening of concealed and unconcealed meaning’(Gasché, 1986: 202). In other words, the relation to an Other is not an incidental aspect of identity: it is a condition of possibility of any identity, which, in the Derridean phrase ‘always already’ differs/defers it from itself. On the one hand, the term ‘spacing’ can refer to exteriority per se: it is ‘the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other, of an inside to an outside’ (Gasché, 1986: 199). On the other hand, the term itself indicates a particular relationship to spatio-temporal conditions, as affected by movement. The production of intervals which takes place in the activity of spacing marks at once ’the insinuation of a space into the supposedly self-sufficient present’, but also the ‘becoming-time of space’(Gasché, 1986: 198), its displacement or dislocation into time. Spacing is above all an activity, a process, a movement, which means that it cannot be pinned down and reduced to any particular semantic category. This should not be confused with the notion of ambiguity or polyvalence: it is not that the meaning is vague, or that several things are meant at once, but rather that no conceptual meaning can account for the process of spacing, which precedes and interferes with conceptual categories.