BERKELEY, California — Dance legend Merce Cunningham is famous for leaving things to chance.
So when his latest work, BIPED, premiered over the weekend, the 80-year-old choreographer and his technical collaborators were as much in the dark as the rest of the audience.
Cunningham had not seen the animations and computerized decor that artists Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser had created for the piece. And the artists had never seen the Cunningham dancers perform the choreography.
They may have wondered whether the full-length work would successfully merge dance and technology. But Friday’s performance at the University of California at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall proved the adage that serendipity is the best choreographer. The standing ovation and whoops from the audience were signs that the successful marriage of dance and technology has just begun.
When the curtain rose, the dancers looked out from behind a mesh scrim that stretched across the stage, costumed in reflective bodysuits that seemed to emanate light. Dancers shimmered across the stage in a series of solos, displaying the technical expertise and long-limbed grace that are Cunningham’s signature.
The choreography was a welcome departure for Cunningham, who is sometimes criticized for turning dancers into technicians. In BIPED, the dancers were sumptuously human, lengthening their limbs to full extension, fluidly moving though each phrase, and relating to one another onstage. The score by Gavin Bryars, with its Wagnerian melodies, added emphasis to their lush movements.
The first animation was a thin purple line that traveled across the scrim, mirroring the set of slim white panels along the back wall. The audience gasped as the first virtual dancers appeared a few minutes later.
Composed of spare and colorful lines, the hand-drawn animations moved gracefully across the scrim, appearing to mingle with the real dancers.
Kaiser and Eshkar, multimedia artists from Riverbed, created the animations by capturing the motions of three Cunningham dancers and translating the data onto BIPED, the animated 3-D figure created by Character Studio software. Eshkar drew the virtual dancers in a calligraphic style to capture the essence of movement.
“I didn’t look at the dancers and their anatomy when I drew them,” Eshkar said. “I looked at the movement and tried to give the hand-drawn bodies that same quality of movement. With every drawing I asked myself, ‘Is the line motivated by the movement?'”
Some of the movements were so subtle that the animated figures seemed almost human, and Eshkar’s artistry provided the semblance of intention and feeling.
The animations wove in and out of the live performance as the piece progressed: The dancers were alone on stage, then accompanied by computerized visuals, such as splintering lines or floating white spheres. Virtual dancers sometimes appeared as figures, other times as pixelated clusters of movement, meshing seamlessly with the movements of the dancers onstage.
In a performance where even the creators were unsure of how the combined media would fare together onstage, there were incredible moments where dance and technology seemed to speak the same language.
At one point, a hand-drawn animation danced across the scrim. Before vanishing, it turned to the real dancer onstage, as if in a parting gesture. During a duet in the middle of the piece, two dancers turned and reached toward each other while the virtual dancer stepped slowly and tentatively on their outstretched arms.
BIPED also had its rough spots. At times, the decor distracted from the dancing onstage. One animated figure — composed of curved lines that moved in tandem — seemed more a technical experiment than an artistic choice.
Recently asked why he left so much of his work to chance, Cunningham replied, “You risk because you might find something.”
In BIPED, he certainly has. The technologically rendered dancers and decor added a fresh dimension and complexity to Cunningham’s choreography. Its success will pry open the door between dance and technology and drive innovation in both fields.
