Moves and Movies

As the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company crosses the country and the globe on its two-year Legacy Tour,
New Yorkers have to wait their turn until next year, when the troupe will
perform in several local venues. The recent local premiere of Cunningham’s Xover at Fall for Dance was a
tantalizing reminder of what we’ve been missing, and now an enterprising
monthly film series will offer the master choreographer’s work in a different,
but also very vital, form. Beginning next Monday, with the world premiere of Interscape, the series gets underway
with four films by Charles Atlas, each recording and interpreting for the
camera a major late Cunningham dance.

Cunningham was in the
vanguard of exploring the possibilities of dance on film and video, and Atlas
was a crucial interpreter and collaborator on many of those projects. An
assistant stage manager for the company in the early 1970s, he was also a
filmmaker, and made a film of Cunningham’s Walkaround
Time. A fruitful, innovative collaboration was soon launched. “When Merce
decided that he wanted to make video projects, he invited me to collaborate
with him,” Atlas recalls. “I didn’t know video; I just was a filmmaker. So I
learned video from a book, and then I taught it to him. That’s how it began.”

“It” came to include a
series of masterful dance videos, including Fractions,
Locale, Channels/Inserts, for which Cunningham re-envisioned his
choreography for the camera or even created a work specifically for the camera.
After 1983, Atlas turned his focus to other projects, but in 1999 he again
became closely involved with Cunningham’s work and spent much of the ensuing
decade filming the master chorographer’s late works, as well as important
revivals.

“During this recent period,
starting in 1999, I’ve been filming the pieces on stages, with minimal changes
for camera. So they’re basically recordings of pieces,” Atlas says. But his
luminous film of the 2000 dance Interscape,
which captures the thrill of Cunningham’s unpredictable sense of space, as well
as peerless performances by the company members of that moment, is much more
than a mere recording. Atlas’ decades of working closely with Cunningham and
his intimate knowledge of the choreography enable him to see—and in turn let us
see—all the work’s intricacies, surprises and contrasts.

“I respect the
choreography, but I impose my own eye on it. But I feel since I’ve worked with
Merce for so long, I almost have the choreographer’s eye,” Atlas notes.
“Normally, I videotape the dance in rehearsal, and then study the tapes and
make elaborate notes. With either one or two assistants, we talk directly to
the cameramen during the filming, reminding them who they have to follow, and
what they have to include.”

Interscape,
a 45-minute work, was filmed on a theater stage in France, though not in
performance, a year after its premiere. Atlas filmed a number of the dances
there at the time, thanks to an arrangement that allowed the company to film
there in exchange for giving a free performance. Atlas’ film of BIPED, a 1999 dance that is one of
Cunningham’s most mesmerizing and visually striking productions, will be shown
Nov. 15. Split Sides, a 2003 work
which features music by Radiohead and Sigur Rós,
as well as multiple options determined at each performance by chance
procedures, was filmed in 2006 at SUNY Purchase. It will be shown Dec. 20.

Closing out the initial
quartet of screenings—plans call for the series to continue throughout 2011—is
Atlas’ film of Cunningham’s mighty Ocean,
a 1994 work, infrequently performed since it must be seen in the round. He
filmed its September 2008 performances in the Rainbow Granite Quarry in Waite
Park, Minn., confronting “enormous challenges.” He lost crucial time to bad
weather, and was filming, this time, in live performance. “Because it’s a piece
in the round, I wasn’t sure that I could successfully translate that into a
single-screen film.”

But by then, Atlas knew
Cunningham’s work as well as anyone, and was prepared for such a challenge.
“Merce used the whole space in his work, it wasn’t just the center of the
stage. So that’s challenging, to keep a sense of space and how he uses space
and at the same time wanting to see the dancers. With certain pieces, if there
was an option, I chose which ones I thought would work best for film.” For
these later films (and he notes that there are about a dozen of them yet to be
seen), he would show his edits to Cunningham for comment—but they did not work
together in the close collaboration of the earlier period, when Cunningham
often re-conceived his choreography for Atlas’ camera.

Each monthly screening will
include discussion with related artists; Atlas plans to attend the two that are
premieres. Each will also include an episode of the lively, informative web
series, Mondays with Merce, which
offer insights into many aspects of his repertory and choreographic process.

BAC Flicks: Mondays with
Merce

Oct. 11, Nov. 15, Dec. 20,
Jan. 10, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St. (betw. 10th & 11th
Aves.), 212-868-4444; 7, $15 (Fall series: 3 for $30).