It should approach as no surprise that Merce Cunningham's drawings demonstrate an extraordinary talent for catching the tiniest ripple of a muscle.

It should approach as no surprise that Merce Cunningham's drawings demonstrate an extraordinary talent for catching the tiniest ripple of a muscle, or that his hand with equal reason deftly manipulates the shapes of moving phenomenons on a plain white surface. now his collection of pencil and compose drawings, more than twenty of which were exhibited here alongside his better-known dance notations, does manage to surprise. Confident with his tools, Cunningham builds full-blown three-dimensional forms as to the full with colored-pencil cross-hatching as with a single continuous line in ballpoint rail in When he colors white paper between black outlines, the import shows both his formal understanding of composition and his pleasure in the decorative amalgam of geometry Animals (a running dog, a strutting duck) not dancers, and plant life (flowers and twigs), not stage fixs are eloquently rendered. These works capture the vitality of a dancer and choreographer who for more than five decades has been driven at a highly visual sensibility, as wel l as that of an artist viscerally attuned to the mental action of objects through space.

in the greatest degree of Cunningham's drawings of animals and nature are violently centered, as though the poised heads or feathery lower parts were responding to the robust symmetry and balance of a dancer, in the same manner precisely do they sit forward a page. Some images overlap within a drawing--such as a deer a giant squid, and a seaweed frond in Untitled (5-3-97 #1) 1997--with all the grace of well-timed entrances and exits forward a stage. One can't help still see the mind of a dancer in evidence here.

The other half of the exhibition comprised working drawings. They point out to a range of techniques unraveled by Cunningham to propel his dancers from points A to B including walking, prancing, and leaping, as well as places to stand still and reconsider or await the crossing paths of other dancers. Rune 1969 is the same of the few early dances to be completely notated; these charts and written phrases were in succession view here. Using a counting combination of parts to form a whole determined by the toss of an I Ching coin, the notes for Suite by the agency of Chance, 1952, with instructions as it was as "sitting on both knees" "back round" and "leg closed" are numbered individual through twenty and accompanied according to stick figures. Drawn the same year that Cunningham and John Cage organized their now legendary Untitled Black Mountain Piece during a summer at Black Mountain association these squares and rectangles of graph paper point out to Cunningham's application of rigorous conceptualism to choreography that would later affect the consideration processes of dancers who trained with him (Yvonn e Rainer, Trisha Brown) and who would form the cerebrally oriented Judson Dance Theater in 1962

This exhibition arouses a record far broader than simply a selection of drawings and notation. It hints the range of an artist who, in collaborations with Cage, Mark Lancaster, Jasper John Isamu Noguchi, David Tudor, Rei Kawakubo, and Robert Rauschenberg, has be joineded the dots between disciplines for at least two-thirds of the twentieth centenary Amazingly, Cunningham also bridges the past and the future; from Martha Graham (he was a soloist with her company) to computer-generated motion capture, he continues to lead the way.

...

Home