Missy | July 15, 2005
Okay, I’ve been meaning to get to this for the past 24 hours but I haven’t had time (guess who’s writing SAS code this weekend? me! and that’s mostly by choice…) Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, kicking off the 2005 Lincoln Center Festival, swims with life. (No more bad metaphors from here on out, I promise). Based on what supposedly would have been James Joyce’s project following Finnegan’s Wake were it not for his death, composer John Cage envisioned an abstract oceanic lifeform of the literary piece that never came to be. Only, Cage himself died before Ocean could be created, though his ideas are there: a circular space, with the audience forming a ring around the stage, with the orchestra circling the audience. And man if I wasn’t in awe in the adaptability of Rose Hall. (One reason why Ocean is rarely performed is because of its stringent requirements of set-up alone.)
But here’s where things get trickier still. I’m going off of the program notes, which are a little baffling, and what I witnessed. The orchestra is unconducted. The orchestral piece (as opposed to the electronic piece, composed independently and layered on top of the orchestral score) has no score. I know, I don’t quite get it, either. Let me quote composer Andrew Culver’s notes:
Ocean 1-95 consists of 30,067 Events spread over 2,403 pages divided among the parts for 112 musicians. There is no score. Five sequences of 19 compositions are played simultaneously yet non-synchronously, forming the 95 compositions that make up the work. Individual musicians move from piece to piece as they become available. Each time a player enters a new composition, he or she will find it composed according to a different set of rules and parameters (1 of 20). Each piece must be performed according to 1 of 7 sets of performance practices.
The mind, it boggles. On top of this is, as I mentioned, was an entirely different composition (by David Tudor) of electronically-recorded and altered sound–aquatic life, sonar, etc and the arrangement of which differs from one performance to the next. Got it? Right. Let’s move on. The choreography was initially to be made of 64 phrases (based on the 64 hexagrams in I Ching, the source of ‘chance operations’) but Cunningham doubled that number to fill out 90 minutes of performance time. Individual phrases in dance are a fairly straightforward concept–a phrase may be a brief solo or duet, it may be a series of steps that are repeated in some variation among different dancers.
All of this together makes up 90 minutes. So that nobody (be they dancer, musician, lighting engineer, etc) gets lost, there are clocks placed at various points around the stage. I imagine dancers base their entrances on what time it is, since they cannot rely on musical cues–I assume there are clocks backstage as well. What you get from all of this are a series of individual stunning and dynamic moments comprising a whole. It’s all fascinatingly complicated, and the dancers’ instincts are astonishing. (Cunningham’s Split Sides–that which uses compositions by Radiohead and Sigur Ros–among other works relies on such unusual, unique encounters, or Chance Aesthetic, to create truly remarkable and unique and, of course, very abstract works.)
So what is it about, you may ask? Well, nothing specific. As mentioned, the impulse comes from Joyce, the ocean, and the chance aesthetic. Beyond that, if you’re looking for any sort of narrative, you’re out of luck. I find that, more often than not, Merce’s pieces create facets of nature out of the dancers–they are not people, in other words. I don’t think I can necessarily call them mood pieces, however, since there’s something mechanical about his technique and choreography, and there’s nothing obvious about his imagery, but I also cannot say that the pieces lack warmth. I’d wager that it’s highly intellectual above all else, but to watch it doesn’t require a brainiac, only patience.
The purple costumes, around minute 86.
Related: From an autobiographical statement from John Cage:
We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn’t speak or talk like a human being, that doesn’t know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
Category: Uncategorized |
Comments Off
Tags:
