Merce Cunningham not only creates respected work, he
collaborates with people whose work he respects.
Sculptor Charles Long was asked by the modern dance
choreographer to create sets for “Way Station,” a piece
that will be performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Friday
night at Royce Hall.
The work represents one of many joint projects for Cunningham,
whose collaborations have included artists Robert Rauschenberg,
Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol over the last 50 years.
But for Long, the combination of dance and sculpture in live
performance was an unprecedented experience.
Currently living in Los Angeles and teaching at CalArts, Long
has displayed his sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among other
established museums and galleries around the world.
He’d previously collaborated with the French band
Stereolab, but had no experience working with dancers.
When he was originally contacted by Trevor Carlson,
Cunningham’s general manager, he had no intention of doing
so.
“At the time, I was so out of touch with my own
body,” Long said. “I thought, dance ““ I
don’t get it. I didn’t understand why people would want
to flop their bodies around.”
But when Carlson contacted Long again four years later,
he’d had time to reconsider. He realized, as he said,
“that I had to yield.”
Long credits his study of Taoism and the “I Ching,”
the ancient Chinese book of divination, as helping him to
understand Cunningham’s work. Cunningham, he said, uses an
element of chance in creating his dances, often rolling dice to
determine the structure of a piece.
“It’s an acknowledgment of a dimension of our lives
which is in change,” Long said. “The idea of using
chance purposefully is a way of reminding yourself that everything
is in flux. You really don’t know what’s going to
happen in the next moment. It’s really great when
you’re working around issues of movement, weight, shape,
mass. Issues that aren’t right or wrong.”
The sculptures he created for “Way Station” were
inspired in part by the work of artist Alberto Giacometti ““
long-legged, abstract forms that gather together at the top to form
a kind of body. Composed of steel armature covered with
aluminum-foil-backed paper, the large-scale, colorful
“creatures” stand up on their own, much like the
dancers do ““ autonomous and strong.
Much of Long’s work deals with the paradox that he
believes exists between individuals and their environment ““
the idea that humans can be independent when really, he said,
we’re all basically just living off the energy of our last
meal.
But whatever interpretations might accompany the forms
he’s placed on the stage, Long said that his collaboration
with Cunningham has taught him to keep his mind open, if at all
possible.
“Just experience the work, if you can,” he said.
“Don’t try to find a narrative or a story, but just
take it in without referring to anything else. Just open your eyes
and see what’s happening right then and there.”