Practitioner focus: Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham has been recognized in his lifetime as one of the most innovative and influential choreographers of the 20^th century. He danced in the Martha Graham Company for six years before founding his own company in 1953. Cunningham’s work focused three key ideas: reconsidering the relationship between music and movement; employing chance as a method of devising new choreography; and exploring the possibilities of mixing artistic endeavour with technology. Cunningham was a pioneer of dance for camera, whose work was documented and preserved through film. His methods live on, not only in dance but also in the wider arts and theatre movements.

Style and methods

Cunningham challenged established consecutive dance structure, developing a methodology based on work devised by chance. He rehearsed phrases of choreographed movement and applied a series of procedures based on chance so the phrases could be performed in different random combinations. Cunningham employed a range of procedures to this effect including tossing a coin, picking cards, or throwing a die to determine a new order of events.

Although his movement style was likened to ballet, Cunningham trained his dancers in a technique that allowed the body to move free from conventional forms. He developed training for the body and mind to free the dancers from the constraints of chronology and fixed boundaries which, in his view, stifled the development of original work. Front and centre stage were not reserved for soloists: he abandoned fixed points and developed performances structured using random devising.

The following two lesson plans offer some approaches that incorporate Cunningham’s vision of a new choreography to new forms of drama that eschew the rationalist form of the naturalistic approach to playmaking and playwriting.

The Cut-Up MethodThe Cut-Up Method allows students to instigate spontaneous youth-authored work and compose their own performances dictated by chance. You will note the extraordinary effects, distortions and frenzied surreality that emerges from this activity.

Materials: newspapers, magazines, scissors, gum, plain paper

In groups of two or three:

• randomly choose and cut out words, sentences and phrases from the materials provided.
• Place the cut-up paper into a hat, asking each performer to pull out a piece of paper at random. The first out is the first line spoken by the first character and so on. Using the gum, stick them down to create a short playscript.
• Students apply random emotions and intensions to their paired or three-way cut up dialogues, offering alternative interpretations to the text.
• Each time this method is performed there is the element of chance, creating a product that is never the same.

The Happening

Cunningham believed that theatre takes place all the time given the arbitrary conditions of human life. A Happening is an event which prompts the viewer or spect-actor to mould the action. Most of the participants are unaware that the Happening has been orchestrated and spontaneous human impulse inspires the action.This method eschews rehearsal and the absence of normative boundaries and orientates this style of drama towards an authentic outcome.

Materials: three envelopes, a wastepaper bin and a hidden cameraBefore the workshop organise three envelopes to be given to three selected students before the class with instructions to keep the contents secret from each other and the rest of the class.

Envelope 1 contains a piece of chewing gum with instructions to continue chewing, when challenged they must knock the disposal bin out of the hands of the teacher until they call ‘Squirrocks!’, whereupon they must meekly dispose of the gum.

Envelope 2 contains an instruction for the student to relentlessly challenge the individual chewing to give up their gum. However, on the command of ‘Squirrocks!’ they must lie down and pretend to sleep.

Envelope 3 contains an instruction for the student to act as mediator in the face of the rising conflict. On the command of ‘Squirrocks!’ they must put the bin over their head and start singing ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’.

• Begin by establishing a familiar circle exercise or a game.
• Trigger ‘The Happening’ by stopping the game by asking and then demanding that the student chewing gum must cease chewing and put it in the bin.
• When the chewer refuses and knocks the bin out of the teacher’s hand engage the class as a whole by threatening them all with detention unless gum chewer obeys instructions. The more hapless and ineffective the teacher behaves the better.
• Allow all of the student ‘spect-actors’ to engage in the situation.
• Squirrocks signs the end the improvisation.
• Discuss the work and their experience and the filmic record in order to evaluate the action in the light of the precepts set by Cunningham.