The Merce Cunningham Dance Company - Roaratorio, at the Theatre de la Ville, Paris; November 13th, 2010

If dance is the pre-eminent art of the body, the body unalloyed in its beauty, and unadorned by technology; in the choreography of Merce Cunningham, we find the body transfigured and transcended, to the point where, as in the philosophy of Donna Haraway, the line between the human and its android doppelganger becomes blurry to the point of indistinguishability. Not just Olympia, the mechanical doll from Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffman (as filmed, perhaps, by Powell and Pressburger), but a whole stage full of dancing automatons have been released from their box. But never have these clockwork figures appeared so tender, so pliable. Choreographed by Danceforms software to programme bodies imaginable only through wetware, we find the human at its most subjective in its transcendence, its communion with objects.

Elements of classical ballet, the modern dance of Cunningham's mentor Martha Graham, and -this being a "circus" on Finnegan's Wake - Irish dancing of the Riverdance variety, converge in occult combinations; finding impossible correspondences and convergences, spinning gold from base metal. From this seeming unrelatedness, elements adrift on an even plain, the eye picks out details and attractions at its own pace. Accepting the inevitable partiality of its position in space (as the ear must equally, in listening to Cage's accompanying music), one regards the whole more as one views a vast canvas, and with scant reference to the standard narrative expectations of classical ballet.

Structure emerges as if by accident, with the beauty of DNA, ant farms, or fractals. From moments of the strictest discipline spills the most casual intimacy; machinic rigour thus become inseparable from the simplest, most human of gestures. Even the stools, their cushions in the same colours as the dancers' clothes, are arranged, as if to emphasise the very objectness of the human figures, in the same holds and wild combinations as the coryphées themselves. The world of Roaratorio - and a whole world it most certainly is - is one in which tension and release, the animate and inanimate, form four points of a highly unstable Greimasian semiotic square which are constantly changing places with each other. This is why the dance does not 'mean' anything. It is not a work whose 'deeper' hidden truth can be divined or interpreted. Everything is on the surface, teeming with life. This is the sense in which, with Cage and Cunningham, artworks move from the romantic position of imitating natural phenomenon to operating themselves according to nature's own way of working. Without purpose, unpredictable, yet strangely fascinating.

(Photo credit: Merce Cunningham Dance Company/Bernand)

Merce Cunningham on Film

"The use of camera has extended the sense of what dance can be ... The two media do not compete, each abides in its own territory."

In a way, a piece such as 'Changing Steps' (choreographed 1978, filmed 1989) is ideally suited to film, it has a proto-cinematic quality to it. The indeterminacy of the piece - its various solo and group dances can be performed in any order, separately or overlapping as space allows - suggests the process of editing, offering up all sorts of possibilities for montage and juxtaposition. In the filmed version (of which an extract is embedded above), dances cut and dissolve into each other, sometimes hanging suspended in superposition. In the fragment above, the great wooden frame, separating the foreground dance from the background, suggests a cinema screen. Similarly, in 'Beach Birds for Camera', a sequence of the dance takes place on a soundstage, before a vast blue screen, suggesting the future presence of some fantastical imagery that is yet to be filled in. The film of 'Changing Steps', as presented in Amsterdam-based Total Film's 2003 DVD, The Merce Cunningham Collection, presents a collage of film and video, the latter is often severely degraded, blurring the dancers' features, and giving the whole an eerie, spectral feel. At one point we dissolve from the flickering lines of TV static to ripples on a pond, almost perfectly matched (but not quite).

'Deli Commedia' (1985) is Cunningham's tribute to the physical comedies of the silent era. While Pat Richter's Carmen-quoting music evokes the piano accompanist in a pre-war picture palace, the dancers movements frequently evoke, not just Chaplin, but also the not-quite-silent films of Jacques Tati. It is a curious feature of Cunningham's work for camera that, despite the presence of a non-diegetic musical score, a sound recorder is employed to record the footfalls of the dancers. In his introduction to 'Deli Commedia', Cunningham says, "One of the first things I saw through the camera was that you saw things faster ... That is, you caught the image quicker ... You did not have to dwell on it as long ... " For Cunningham, as for Paul Virilio, the emergence and mastering of new technologies is a question of speed. It is through speed that the twentieth century's artworks relate to its wars.

'Beach Birds for Camera' (1993) presents the human as but a brief mediating force between two non-human technologies: the Lifeforms software Cunningham used to choreograph the dance and the camera for which the staged version (entitled simply 'Beach Birds') was later adapted. But long before he began engaging with cinema and software, Cunningham had set out, in the words of Dee Reynolds, "to discover new parameters of the ‘human’ ... These assaults were frequently seen by contemporaries as attacks on the ‘human’ itself." The notion of the expressive human subject has always been extremely fragile in his work from the very beginning. As Reynolds continues, "Many critical comments on Cunningham in fact focus on the ‘undecidability’ of movements involving interactions between the ‘human’ the ‘natural’, and the ‘automated’." Perhaps nowhere is this slippage more uncertain than in the (1999) work 'Biped', for which motion capture software is used to allow the movements of the dancers to animate computer graphic lines and shapes projected on a scrim between the stage and the audience. Watching videos of 'Biped' (a piece not designed for camera), the scrim appears scarcely noticeable and the graphic lines and figures seem to take on an astonishing 3D quality, not just leaping out at the audience, but also effectively conveying depth, and drawing the audience further in to the performance.

The Opera of the Future

What might a possible opera of the future look like? As the human genome becomes increasingly manipulable, we can imagine, for instance, the return of the male castrati singer - castrated, as it were, in advance, belting a perfect treble into middle age. Singers could be bred to sing impossibly high or impossibly low. One can imagine singers with such voice boxes they could be heard for miles around. The architecture of opera houses need no longer be so enslaved to acoustics with such singers. Picture a single performer on stage, singing both tenor and bass, harmonising with himself through two different larynxes.

To be just a little more down to earth, The Merce Cunningham dance group has already performed on stage with digitally projected 'virtual' dancers. For some years now, Cunningham's company used the Lifeforms software, so it was said, in order to experiment with movements the aging Cunningham was no longer able to perform. As the notion of 'augmented reality' becomes increasingly popularised, such imagery could become more commonplace. Before very long we could have the audience projecting their own translations of the libretto onto the heads of the people in front, in whatever language they chose, with optional pop up notes on points of interest in the music as they come up. One can imagine it eventually possible to recreate, in a manner that would appear as solid and three-dimensional as reality, any of the special effects and grand virtual set pieces we see at the cinema, live and on stage. With such possibilities, why would anyone chose to keep staring at a screen? Cinema tickets are already more expensive than tickets to the opera.