Merce Cunningham recreated dance, taking it from movement intended to relate a narrative to an organic outgrowth of a body’s natural flow.

However, once the internationally famed choreographer developed his method and style—after he trained dancers to execute precise spinal arcs, steps, leaps and bends, he did the unthinkable: He flipped a coin.

And the incensed dance world promptly flipped out.

Dance is dance. And dance is chance. Most of all, though, dance is Merce Cunningham.

Merce rolled the dice. He drew a card and tossed the I Ching. As his longtime collaborator John Cage insisted, he and Cunningham used chance, but explicitly rejected improvisation. (In improv, a performer tends to do the things she knows and ends up repeating herself, he explained. But with rigorously randomized chance, the dancer and musician are led to do something new and different.)

Here was Martha Graham’s lead dancer, an artist well-schooled in the rules. What was he thinking?

It was as if an architect decided to design a building down to the smallest detail, then cut and pasted the plan to create a structural collage. Cunningham, now 87, struck as severe a blow to the dance establishment as would a composer who deconstructed his score and randomly rearranged constituent parts.

It wasn’t just wrong. It was simply not done.

And so, of course, Cunningham found common cause with Cage, who was doing just that with his music. Abrupt ends and beginnings. Railroad trains, grinding gears, the string section in full throat followed by breaking glass, or, most shocking of all—total silence. And then the dancer enlisted the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, who were taking apart the plastic arts with can openers and tire irons.

“eyeSpace,” the group’s newest work shown here, involves the use of iPods.

Cunningham and Cage collaborated at Black Mountain College in 1953 and introduced a new aesthetic. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s upcoming Asheville shows are its first here in the intervening 54 years.

“Dance is dance,” Cage and Cunningham explained in ‘53, to almost no one’s satisfaction. R. Buckminster Fuller joined the conversation, adding his reinvention of engineering and mathematics to the mix. Cunningham invited fellow dancers from the Big Apple to join his experiment at the radical little school, and a dance company began to stir.

Walking around—and walking out

Atonality, arrhythmia, found sound and natural movement had decoupled dance from storytelling and the score from traditional music—but Cunningham further divided his productions. In a recent lecture, the choreographer’s one-time student, Asheville Ballet Director Ann Dunn, revealed: “Merce probably commissioned more work from others than any other artist.

“But,” she said, “he set them free. He never told them what to do.” So the dance and music and design could be created independently, only coming together on the stage.

His dancers became accustomed to the idea that the music they heard in rehearsal might not be the performance score, and that the music in subsequent performances could change. For “Split Sides” (2003), live music was provided by British alt staple Radiohead and by Sigur Rós, an experimental group from Iceland.

Holding tight to their tights: In one early piece, Andy Warhol, at Cunningham’s behest, snipped the dancers’ costumes to rags right before they went on stage.

Neither band had previously seen the dance company.

MCDC practice sessions are counted out with a stopwatch instead of a metronome. One critic, reviewing two performances in the mid ‘60s, said he preferred the one that was executed, due to a musicians’ strike, in complete silence.

For the scores, Cage produced sounds (or silences), read texts aloud while smoking a cigarette and sipping champagne, enlisted readers in foreign tongues, used tape and Robert Moog’s synthesizers and introduced technologies that included dancers as input devices for sound generation (see sidebar). Cage challenged audiences, sometimes to the point that they walked out. As critic Michael Walsh wrote in Time magazine on the occasion of the composer’s death in 1993: “Cage may be the first important artist whose work one wants neither to hear nor see.”

For “Rainforest” (1968), Johns, artistic advisor of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1967 to 1974, enlisted Warhol, who created large, slightly buoyant Mylar pillows, which the dancers didn’t encounter until opening night. Just before that opening, Warhol moved between the performers with a pair of scissors, snipping ragged holes in their costumes, adding textural contrast to the mirrored plastic bubbles. They then danced between shiny objects that bounced and bounded when bumped. Johns also engaged Frank Stella, Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman as designers, and adapted Marcel Duchamp’s “Large Glass” as a set for “Walkaround Time” (1968).

What may or may not occur

iPods figure prominently in this weekend’s performances at Asheville’s Diana Wortham Theatre, which will include “Crises” (1963), “CRWDSPCR” (1993) and the latest version of Cunningham’s newest dance, “eyeSpace” (2007). The three pieces span the second half of Cunningham’s career, a diverse sampling from the 200 or more dances in his portfolio. The first features Conlon Nancarrow’s score for three player pianos (non-simultaneous, of course) and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg. The second, variously pronounced “Crowd Spacer” or “Crowds Pacer,” is one of Cunningham’s early creations using “DanceForms” software—choreography by computer. The music, “blues 99,” by John King, is produced through electronic transformations of the sounds of a Dobro. Mark Lancaster’s multicolored costumes divide the dancers’ bodies into 14 sections, vertically and horizontally.

This second iteration of “eyeSpace” premiered in Miami on Feb. 23. Composer David Behrman wrote the score, which he described as an homage to Cage and to the composer’s Music for Marcel Duchamp, created 60 years ago. Behrman is quoted on the MCDC Web site: “I reflected on the close relationship among Duchamp, John Cage and Merce over the decades; on the long, distinguished trajectory of Merce and his Company; and also remembered that my own first music commission for the Company, “Walkaround Time,” in the Sixties, had involved the art of Duchamp.”

However, Behrman and Cunningham added a technological twist unavailable to Cage: the iPod. Ticket holders will be able to download a unique version of the “eyeSpace” score to their personal iPods before the performance, or listen to loaner devices available at the theater. When audience members pop in their ear buds and click on the control wheel, no two listeners will hear the same score simultaneously. 

“A stage acts as a folded space, with entrances and exits that only lead back to themselves,” explains Daniel Arsham, creator of the “eyeSpace” décor.

“A dancer,” he says, “can exit on stage left and reappear on the right without question from the audience. What if the floor and ceiling could possess similar transposable functions? For the set, I envision a situation where the surfaces of the stage themselves become as active as the dancers who perform on them.”

When Asheville theatergoers take their seats this weekend, they will rediscover that, 50 years after the collapse of Black Mountain College, the school and its alumni remain avant-garde.

Fuller’s famous self-identification applies in equal measure to Cunningham and Cage: “iSeem to be a verb.”

eyeMerce: a look at some of the choreographer’s most memorable pieces

• “Symphonie pour un homme seul” (1952)—first use in the United States of “musique concrete,” a style which assembled and abstracted real-world sounds on recording tape.
• “Crises” (1963)—score is Conlon Nancarrow’s studies for three player pianos; the separated mechanization creates polyrhythmia.
• “Aeon” (1963)—exploding flares and moving smoke machine.
• “Story” (1963)—background noise derived from the audible universe by Toshi Ichiyanagi.
• “Winterbranch” (1964)—strange machine with winking lights, bright lights on audience, extremely loud screeching score.
• “Variations V” (1965)—six projectors throw moving and still images on dancers. Also incorporated are magnetically sensitive poles—as the dancers pass near the poles, their bodies break electromagnetic fields. At the same time, photoelectric cells detect dancers’ shadows. Either effect causes changes in the score, done in collaboration with Robert Moog.
• “Place” (1966)—futuristic look with see-through plastic costumes and geodesic lights, a nod to Buckminster Fuller, whose ideas influenced Cunningham during their collaboration at Black Mountain College.
• “Scramble” (1967)—score performed by whatever instruments were available, electronically distorted.
• “Rainforest” (1968)—Warhol’s large Mylar pillows, some helium-filled, dot the set. Mylar balloons had sprung into public awareness in 1960 and 1964 with NASA’s launch of two Echo communications satellites whose 300-foot disks reflected visible light and radio signals from space.
• “Walkaround Time” (1968)—title taken from computer science. In the early days of computing, a programmer would load a program and start the computer running, then have “walkaround time” while computations were slowly cranked toward solution.
• “Canfield” (1969)—huge vertical boom projecting glaring lights swings through dancers’ space. The score is Pauline Oliveros’ “In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer.” Dance elements are constantly reordered so that no two performances are the same.
• “Tread” (1970)—designer Bruce Nauman included a phalanx of 10 electric fans, five of which oscillated, with a taped, overdubbed score, the musician playing a duet with himself.
• “Blue Studio” (1975)—a video made with computerized editing which permitted creation of five interacting dancing Cunninghams performing on a road within a continuously moving landscape.
• “Fractions” (1977)—a dance choreographed for video recording.
• “Locale” (1979)—a film in which the camera is used to observe dance in a way that an audience cannot (due to speed, height and angles). And so the choreographer becomes responsible for movement of the audience as well as that of the dancers.
• “Neighbors” and “Trackers” (1991)—Cunningham’s first choreography using a computer program.
• “Biped” (1999)—costumes made of metallic fabric that reflected light in a way that abstracts human form into a simulacrum of digitized liquid movement
• “eyeSpace” (second iteration, 2007)—through the use of separately programmed iPods, no two members of the audience hear the same score.

The Diana Wortham Theatre Mainstage Dance Series presents the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at 8 p.m. Friday, March 9, and Saturday, March 10. $45/general, $43/seniors, $40/students, $10/children. 257-4530.