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Diaghilev/Cunnin
DAVID VAUGHAN
Diaghilev would have loved Cunningham. Besides admiring him
as an artist he would have respected the seriousness and
discipline of his company, the spare wit and style of
Rauschenberg's costumes and lighting, the consistent invention
of the choreography and the provocative strangeness of John
Cage's musical accompaniments. Above all, his acute artistic
antennae would have tingled at the sense that Cunningham was
talking in the language of today.
-Alexander Bland, The Observer
(London), 2 August 1964
It might be said that it was almost by accident that Sergei
Diaghilev became the animator of the most important dance
company the world has ever known-as though ballet chose
Diaghilev, rather than his choosing ballet as the medium
through which his ideas would be transmitted to the world.
Although he had had some musical training he was in the
beginning essentially a dilettante who edited a luxurious
magazine called Mir Iskustva (The Worldof Art) and organized
extraordinary exhibitions. For a while he also edited the
Annual of the Imperial Theaters and at the turn of the
century, when several members of the group of painters
centered around his magazine planned a new production of
Delibes' ballet Sylvia, he acted as intermediary between them
and the administration. The initiative for this production came
from Alexandre Benois, the real balletomane of the group: he
was to design one act and Constantin Korovin another, with
costumes by Leon Bakst and Valentin Serov. In those days
ballet scenery was not designed by artists, it was executed by
scene-painters. Unfortunately, the project collapsed after
Diaghilev had a disagreement with the administration over who
was to receive credit for it, and he was dismissed. (The walls
had been breached, however, and the Mir Iskustva painters did
subsequently design various productions for the Imperial
Theaters.)
A few years later Diaghilev conceived for himself the
mission of showing the art of Russia to western Europe: in
1906 he took an exhibition of Russian painting to Paris, the
following year he organized a series of concerts of Russian
music there, and in 1908 he presented Chaliapin in Boris
Godunov at the Paris Opera. That Diaghilev was still not
particularly interested in the ballet was made clear by his
program note on Tchaikovsky for one of the concerts, which
omitted to mention that the composer had written three
full-length ballets as well as operas and orchestral and chamber
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136
WINTER, 1974/75
137
138
was a fairly traditional one, and the decor and costumes were
further extensions of the same imagery presented in the music
and the choreography.
Cunningham had already been experimenting with chance
methods of composition, in which he sought to free himself
from the limitations of his own imagination and of a dancer's
habitual way of moving from one position to another, by using
such methods as tossing a coin to determine the choice,
sequence, tempo, and frequency of the movements in a dance.
Even Nocturnes was choreographed in this way. Some
consultation with the designer frequently took place, for
obvious reasons-for an example, see Cunningham's letter to
Rauschenberg on his ideas for Antic Meet, reprinted in
Changes, Cunningham's notes on choreography (edited by
Frances Starr for the Something Else Press, 1968). All the
same, Rauschenberg was given and exercised total freedom to
decorate and clothe the piece: the dancers wore basic black
tights and leotards, to which were added 35 ready-made
garments and objects-overalls, burlap sacks, a nightgown,
parachutes, hooped underskirts. In the same year, 1958,
Rauschenberg painted the famous pointillist backcloth and
costumes for Summerspace, for which Cunningham had the
idea, which he described in the same letter as "looking at part
of an enormous landscape and you can only see the action in
this particular portion of it." Rauschenberg carried the idea
further in his decor-when the dancers were at rest they
became almost invisible, camouflaged like insects or animals
whose protective coloring conceals them in their environment.
Again in Aeon (1961), there was the idea of using basic leotards and tights, bluish in color, to which different elements
could be added: long sleeves for the women, trousers made of
feathers for the men. Rauschenberg also devised certain events
such as small explosions that occurred at the front of the stage
as the curtain rose, and a machine suspended from the flies
that passed across above the dancers as they lay prone at the
end of a section. With all these pieces there is a difficulty as far
as an exhibition is concerned: habitually, Rauschenberg did
not design his d6cors and costumes, he made them-there is no
sketch, there is just a costume or a set. This practice was
carried to its logical conclusion in Story (1963), performed all
over the world in the tour of 1964, but never in New York:
for this ballet Rauschenberg constructed a set out of whatever
materials were at hand in each theater the company visited (at
one series of four consecutive performances in London,
Rauschenberg's contribution consisted of making a painting on
stage, which grew night after night); for the costumes the
dancers again wore basic leotards and tights, in yellow this
time, to which they could add various garments out of a large
duffel bag whose contents were dumped in the wings. This
dance and Field Dances of the same year introduced a greater
element of indeterminancy into the performance itself, the
dancers being given freedom of choice among various
possibilities in the choreography. Cunningham has described
this kind of activity as "a kind of anarchy where people may
work freely together."
The end of the world tour also marked the close of the
period of collaboration with Rauschenberg, during most of
which the painter had functioned also as stage manager and
lighting designer. In the last few years, Jasper Johns has been
the artistic advisor to the company, designing some pieces
himself and for others choosing an artist who has been free to
decorate or define the space in whatever way he likes: for
WINTER, 1974/75
Jasper Johns, Set after Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass for Cunningham's Walkaround Time, 1968.
David Vaughn has written on dance for many American and foreign
periodicals. He has been an associate of Merce Cunningham's for 15
years. This piece originally appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition
at Hofstra University's Emily Lowe Gallery.
140