I created this choreography after nine weeks at the Paris Opera. I had suffered so much that when I returned to work with my Company I felt an extraordinary relief, like an explosion. I wanted to create a vigorous, fast, complex piece. The title comes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “in the beginning was sounddance (dance-sound or sound-dance).
Merce Cunningham
In 1973, the Festival d’Avignon and the Festival International de Paris commissioned Cunningham to create a new choreography for twenty-six dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet. The music would be created by John Cage, the sets and costumes by John Jaspers. Un jour ou deux was born (with a musical score independently entitled Etcetera), the first choreography created by Cunningham for an academic company: a ballet today considered historic but which at the time cost its three co-authors a particular effort since the dancers were not at all used to dancing without music or rather with music separate from their movements, nor did they understand why the ballet's sets and costumes had nothing to do with the other components of the show. However traumatic, the Parisian experience had adrenaline-filled consequences on Cunningham: Sounddance - here at its Italian debut - is a cathedral of movements organized with such imagination and perfection that it still leaves the spectator amazed and incredulous. Above all, it is perceived, more than thirty years after its debut, as an explosion of energy, exactly as the choreographer thought and wanted it at the beginning. Perhaps this identity between the author's intentions and the public's perception casts some incredulous shadows on the random and casual practice of chance operations. In reality, the astonishing choreographic grandeur of Sounddance only confirms what is often implicit in aleatory procedures, in the various techniques adopted to distance the subjectivity of the artist-creator from his work: that is, that personality, style, talent are not weakened at all, on the contrary, they are exalted. Any choreographer who creates a piece with aleatory practices will not resemble Cunningham for this reason, just as no image artist could think of resembling Jackson Pollock for the simple fact of throwing paint on a canvas. In other words, the aleatory credentials of Sounddance are indisputable: the piece was born as a work-in-progress within an event broadcast on television, a so-called Video Event, and later, in 1975, it debuted in the theater, at the Music Hall in Detroit. But from this information we can glean very little about its artistic quid. Precious, however, are the indications of the author himself who punctually informs his biographer, David Vaughan, on how the working conditions at the Palais Garnier in Paris impressed themselves on his mind, for example in terms of space. The special compactness of Sounddance and the type of energy, as if compressed, that the ten moving bodies must maintain from the beginning to the end of the piece were born from the memory of the small rehearsal space of Un jour ou deux. “Despite lasting only seventeen or eighteen minutes, the choreography requires a lot of effort and sweat. The entrances and exits take place through a fabric structure, installed in the middle of the stage. The dancers are as if swept away inside an aerodynamic tunnel. The movement itself develops from the plastic rigidity of classical dance. In this piece I wanted many movements and rotations of the torso… The starting point of the structure is to have the ten dancers enter and exit in different ways, one after the other. The leg exercises and the movements of the torso are complex. The whole gives the impression of a space observed under a microscope”. The choreographer adds further notes on David Tudor’s music that has something fascinatingly futuristic: its first title was Toneburst, then changed by Tudor himself to Untitled 1975/1994 on the occasion of a new version of the choreography, re-edited by Chris Komar and Meg Harper, who are responsible for today’s latest revival. “It is a sustained and pulsating electronic music, which creates a very dense sound environment”. To this density, Mark Lancaster’s décor adds a baroque turgidity, with sand tones, something ancient, noble and joyful: like the costumes with tops still the colour of the sun.
