110
PARTISAN REVIEW
Actually, the "isolation" of one part of the body from another in
Cunningham's choreography mirrors the more fundamental isola–
tion of sound, movement, and decor. Both are aspects of his assault
on primitivist unity.
Cunningham's separation of the elements also undermines the
primitivist emphasis on virtual participation, that tendency to blur
the distinction between ritualistic and theatrical dance. Note that for
Brecht, the ultimate goal of this separation (the
Mrfremdungs-Effekt)
is
to preserve the spectator's perceptual freedom. (The Wagnerian
spectator, by contrast, "gets thrown into the melting pot too," ren–
dering him or her perceptually "passive.")
Thus it's particularly significant that in a number of key
Cunningham works the setting forms a physical barrier of sorts that
comes between the spectator and the spectacle. For
Tread (1970),
Bruce Nauman designed a row of standing fans assembled on the
downstage curtain line directly between the audience and the dance.
Jasper Johns's movable plastic partitions for
Walkaround Time (1968)
served a similar, mediating function. Much the same is true of Frank
Stella's
mobile
"color fields" designed for Cunningham's
Scramble
(1967).
These physical barriers are symbolic of Cunningham's desire to
preserve the viewer's perceptual freedom and objectivity, eliminat–
ing any vestige of the "participation mystique." Of course, most
Cunningham dances don't employ such explicit visual obstacles, but
even those that don't still manage, in a variety of ways, to mediate
and complicate the viewer's experience of the dance.
One of Cunningham's most influential works was a dance from
1965 called
How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run.
The choreography was
accompanied by John Cage reading from his books
Silence
and
A Year
From Monday.
Perhaps because words are already" dissociated" from
the things they signify, the language in this work both symbolized
and contributed to the desired separation of the elements.
As I've already suggested, one of the distinguishing features of
postmodern choreography is its eagerness to utilize the resources of
language. One might go so far as to say that when Yvonne Rainer,
Trisha Brown, Kenneth King, and David Gordon incorporate ver–
bal commentaries into their performances they are in a sense "insti–
tutionalizing" the principle of dissociation that Cunningham pio–
neered . (Remember what Bergson said about language coming
between us and our experience.) Rather than yearning nostalgically
