Working with the video camera and the movie camera gave me the opportunity to reflect on certain technical elements. For example, the speed with which we consume a television image inspired me to introduce new tempos into dance and thus to add a new dimension to our practices.
Merce Cunningham
The creation of Views on Stage is rather anomalous even among Cunningham’s most recent and unsettling works. Here the choreographer did not limit himself to preparing a choreography starting from a pre-existing video dance, as he had already done for three other famous ballets of the past (Locale from 1979, Channels/Inserts from 1981 and Coast Zone from 1983) but he assembled the various parts of the staging, as in a cinematographic montage, that is, little by little, in five different cities of Great Britain. In Sheffield the Merce Cunningham Dance Company presented the choreography alone, in Manchester they added the set by the thirty-nine year old Brazilian Ernesto Neto, in Warwick the lights by Josh Jonshon, in Oxford the costumes by James Hall and in Brighton the music by John Cage. Finally Views on Stage debuted in its entirety at the Edinburgh Festival, in the city where the event is held, on 29 October 2004. Instead the video dance Views For Video was completed, with the collaboration of the famous and beloved filmmaker Charlas Atlas, in New York a few months before its theatrical translation and is still awaiting its debut which will take place at Stanford University in Minnesota this March and in Europe at the Montpellier Festival, next June. The overall effect on stage is very strange, as you will notice in this Italian debut. Neto’s large, coagulated chewing-gum-like flow, which from mid-air, where it is suspended, drips down in almost phallic shapes, dominates a choreography where the performers’ solos are all concentrated under the original sky that hangs above them. The thirteen dancers wear white tunics, of Hellenistic style, but the opposing principle that contrasts their “ancient” look with the infantile and ambiguous scenography of coagulated gum, seems to inform the entire dance divided into male and female groups and based on openings and crossings, slow movements and sudden changes of direction, spontaneity and control. The very accurate lights change color from pink to green and mix the two colors, after having also followed a sort of contrasting score. Spasmodic attention to details sur place (legs that knot, hands raised to the sky, dizzying imbalances) much more complex than the dynamic movements almost to reiterate the process of stripping to the essential, the search for a dance of the body and on the body characterizing the last Cunningham who here once again makes use of Cage's music (ASLSP of 1985 and Music for.… composed between 1984 and 1987). The first piece with the title-acronym that stands for as slow as possible, "as slow as possible", consists of eight parts and can be performed both on the piano and on the organ. The freedom of execution of Music for.… is even more accentuated where the suspension points allude to the number of performers varying from two to fifteen. The instrumentation of this last piece can include voices, percussion, strings and wind instruments.
Noteworthy, as a summary of a staging that truly contains a universe of signs where one does not know whether to privilege "listening to the dance or seeing the sounds", is the reference to the beloved James Joyce in ASLSP: as slow as possible returns to a final expression of Finnegans Wake ("Soft morning city! Lsp!") and recalls the influence exerted not only on Cage but also on Cunningham by the Dublin writer.
