Merce Cunningham: Dance and technology

At the end of the twentieth century, technology is changing at an explosive pace, changing with it the form and content of artistic expression. Nowhere is this connection more apparent than in the dance art of Merce Cunningham. In an attempt to gain insight into his creative process, his work with dance, film, video, and computer animation is traced from the early 1960s to the present. Resources consisted of textual and video materials as well as a first-hand study of the techniques of film, video shooting, editing, production, and computer-aided choreography. Cunningham's approach to choreography is seen to be changing constantly to accommodate the constraints as well as possibilities of emerging technological media, from the near-documentary Story (1964) to the virtual choreography of Hand-drawn Spaces (1998), which exists in cyber-space. The following pieces were studied in depth: Story (1964), Westbeth (1974), Locale (1979), Points in Space (1986), and Trackers (1991).