A LOOK BACK: Merce Cunningham's Chance Dances
SKETCH 13: Lucky asks its choreographers to apply an element of chance to their dancemaking. In further considering this prompt, I took a look back at some of the history of chance in dance. Starting in the 1950s, modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham used chance to structure many of his iconic dances. Inspired by his partner and collaborator, the composer John Cage, Cunningham flipped coins, rolled dice, and threw the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text used for divination through 64 hexagrams of broken and unbroken lines.
The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. Three coins are tossed to determine the makeup of each trigram, with the resulting hexagram’s number correlated to a specific element, or in some cases multiple elements, of the dance.
Image description: A black and white table of sixty-four numbered hexagrams, or stacked configurations of six broken and unbroken lines.
For the most part, the choreographer used these tools to prepare and create repeatable dances with set sequences and structures of steps. In this way, Cunningham’s chance procedures differ markedly from “indeterminacy,” an analogous function that uses a structured improvisational score to make a dance that has the potential to be different each time it is performed. While some of his dances involve a degree of indeterminacy, the method was more widely used by composers of the time, including Cage, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. The lineage of indeterminacy continued through the postmodern dance experiments and unbridled improvisations of The Grand Union, Yvonne Rainer, and more under the legendary roof of Judson Memorial Church. Both chance and indeterminacy contributed greatly to the evolution of dance, music, and art in the 20th century, and continue to resonate with artists today.
Merce Cunningham's choreographic notes on the continuity for the solo "50 Looks" (1979). Each set of numbers corresponds to poses from the gamut movement vocabulary and I Ching hexagrams determined by coin tosses. Image courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library, and The Merce Cunningham Trust.
Image description: A white page with black handwritten notes of a series of paired numbers. Reference notes at bottom read: "each line = 10' / 50 Looks Continuity"
Cunningham developed his chance methods in an atmosphere of rigorous experimentation. Patricia Lent, the Cunningham Trust’s Director of Licensing and a former company dancer, outlines two primary elements in the choreographer’s use of chance: the “gamut”—the collection of dance steps or phrase material—and the “continuity”—the structural operation of the dance vocabulary in space and time. By and large, Cunningham’s gamut was a function of physical invention that took place over the course of weeks or months, both outside the studio and during class time, when he would experiment with new phrases. The gamut could be composed of anything from individual static postures (as in 50 Looks, a solo composed entirely of 50), or dance phrases of varying lengths (as in Doubles, a larger dance structured around 13 phrases of 13 counts).
"50 Looks" - Session One from Merce Cunningham Trust on Vimeo.
Patricia Lent introduces and teaches Cunningham’s solo “50 Looks.”
By codifying the physical vocabulary in the gamut, Cunningham could then allow chance to determine the dance’s sequential and spatial continuity within a defined field. In his essay Four Events That Have Led to Large Discoveries, Cunningham outlines the various factors at play in structuring a dance’s continuity, including “what phrase follows what phrase, how time-wise and rhythmically the particular movement operates, how many and which dancers might be involved with it, and where it is in the space and how divided.” These many factors opened up virtually limitless possibilities for chance to function differently in each dance, from relatively simple outcomes to extraordinarily complex feats of physical and spatial engineering.
Throughout his long and prolific career, Cunningham took copious, meticulously detailed notes using his own system of notation: a dense mix of stick figures, number tables, directional vectors, and stage grids. Because he worked from notes before engaging with bodies in space, the interplay between planning and execution was, for dancers like Lent, a “re-enacting of a solved problem” that relied on the dancers’ physical ability to interpret and execute specific directives in time and space.
Notably, at the time of creation the Cunningham company dancers weren’t entirely aware of how the choreographer made his dances, and it’s often only in the restaging process that they encounter the complex web of materials behind the genesis of his work. Dozens of notebooks and scattered papers comprise a rich archive that, together with video and embodied memory, allows Trustees to preserve and reconstruct dances from the inside out. Having danced Cunningham’s work myself, the chance elements baked into the dances bring a quirky tinge and collage-like quality to his angular, athletic abstraction—I feel my complete humanity as my body and brain work together in each moment, taking new chances drawn from chances taken decades ago.