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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Digital traces, whether digitized (programs, notebooks, drawings, etc.) or born digital (emails, websites, video recordings, etc.), constitute a major challenge for the memory of the ephemeral performing arts. Digital technology transforms traces into data and, in doing so, opens them up to manipulation. This paradigm shift calls for a renewal of methodologies for writing the history of theater today, analyzing works and their creative process, and preserving performances. At the crossroads of performing arts studies, the history, digital humanities, conservation and archiving, these methodologies allow us to take into account what is generally dismissed, namely, digital traces that are considered too complex, too numerous, too fragile, of dubious authenticity, etc. With the analysis of Merce Cunningham's digital traces as a guideline, and through many other examples, this book is intended for researchers and archivists, as well as artists and cultural institutions.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
1 The Digital Trace: From Data to Metatrace
1.1. Tracing the ephemeral
1.2. The digital trace
1.3. Transforming traces into data
1.4. Performing arts data
1.5. Conclusion
2 Preserving the Impermanent
2.1. Note: scoring the representation
2.2. Diachronic documentation: reconnecting with the process
2.3. Annotating: redocumentarizing traces
2.4. Denote/connote: artistic intent and datatraces
2.5. Conclusion
3 Writing the History of the Performing Arts
3.1. Sources and resources
3.2. Exposing traces
3.3. Analyzing performing arts data
3.4. Conclusion
Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index of Names
Index of Terms
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Preface
Figure P.1. Explorations of Merce Cunningham Dance Company data from 1938 to 200...
Figure P.2. Representations of the relationships between Merce Cunningham and hi...
Figure P.3. Explorations of Merce Cunningham Dance Company data from 1938 to 200...
Introduction
Figure I.1. Synthesis diagram presenting the articulation between preservation, ...
1: The Digital Trace: From Data to Metatrace
Figure 1.1. Gautier Poupeau, “From record to data, anatomy of a change in granul...
Figure 1.2. Analog and digital trace: displacement and instrumentation. In blue,...
2: Preserving the Impermanent
Figure 2.1.
Adrien M & Claire B
, Hakanai, 2013. Storyboard drawn on a roll of wa...
Figure 2.2.
Adrien M & Claire B
, Le Mouvement de l’air, 2015. Screenshot of the ...
Figure 2.3.
Thierry De Mey
, Light Music, 2004. First version of the score, excer...
Figure 2.4.
Lucinda Childs
, Melody Excerpt, screenshot of the website. a) Video ...
Figure 2.5. Screenshot of Piecemaker 2, showing a video recording and its annota...
Figure 2.6. MemoRekall: editing interface. Capsule created by Clarisse Bardiot f...
Figure 2.7.
Metatrace process shown to the right with the work done on Merce
Figure 2.8.
Motion Bank
, Using the Sky
, score of
No Time to Fly by Deborah Hay, ...
Figure 2.9.
Main Rekall interface with some of the digital traces from
Re: Walde...
3: Writing the History of the Performing Arts
Figure 3.1. Screenshot of Debra Caplan’s website, Visualizing the Vilna Troupe. ...
Figure 3.2.
Hamlet network designed by Franco Moretti (2011, p. 13)
Figure 3.3.
Screenshot of the IntNetViz interface. Example:
L’École des femmes. ...
Figure 3.4. Visualization of the Meserve-Kunhardt photo collection with PixPlot7...
Conclusion
Figure C.1.
Maguy Marin
, Salves
, 2010. Photograph, series
Après le spectacle. © ...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index of Names
Index of Terms
Other titles from iSTE in Science, Society and New Technologies
End User License Agreement
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Traces Set
coordinated by
Sylvie Leleu-Merviel
Performing Arts and Digital Humanities
Volume 5
From Traces to Data
Clarisse Bardiot
First published 2021 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUK
www.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USA
www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2021
The rights of Clarisse Bardiot to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938389
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78630-705-7
Foreword
While the digital humanities have become a fashionable term, their variations remain a delicate subject, especially when it comes to mobilizing them in the context of the performing arts. The book we are about to read by Clarisse Bardiot is therefore a necessary and foundational work.
Two major difficulties motivate Clarisse Bardiot’s work and she makes essential contributions to providing solutions. The first concerns the problem of recording, that is to say, of fixing everything associated with the performance and with real time in a permanent state: to pass from the event to the document, or from the flow to the trace. The second refers to the role of digital technology, a new and unavoidable player because of the possibilities, both of recording and of exploitation, that it allows: from the trace to the data.
These difficulties are not unique to the cultural and artistic field. This is why Clarisse Bardiot’s work has a much broader interest, beyond this field alone, which serves as a real laboratory for observing and understanding phenomena that are experienced elsewhere. Indeed, the artistic field has the immense advantage of constituting what I call a “laboratory object”, which allows us to avoid the choice between an object that is small enough to allow its study and large enough to allow the effects of its complexity to be observed. An artistic production taken as a laboratory object presents a locality that neither dilutes nor dissolves its complexity, which therefore remains observable for a comprehensive study. Even if one is not a specialist in these fields, it is a pleasure to read the pages devoted to Merce Cunningham and to understand the density and depth of the problems raised by her study.
But, to return to the central purpose of this study, how can we have a memory of the ephemeral, beyond our lived memory? How can we remember what has happened? The first concept that arises to answer this question is that of a “trace”, that is to say, what remains, the residue of the passage of the event. But how can one spot a trace among the other objects surrounding it? The trace is located as such insofar as it is detached from its environment as not belonging to it, as an intruder in the causal and global coherence of the environment where it is present. The trace belongs to the past and it is for this reason that it does not belong to the present and is dissociated from it. The trace has the status of a clue, in the sense of a police investigation, which makes it possible to refer to the past event because it constitutes an unusual detail that does not fit into the present context. From the branch broken by the prey and spotted by the hunter, the residue of a substance analyzed by the forensic police, to the singular esthetic detail identified by the art history expert to establish the authenticity of a work, the clue is a trace that belongs to a causality and a phenomenality that no longer exist.
But as soon as the trace is freed from the present that contains it to return it to the past from which it comes, it must be documented, so that it gains the intelligibility it deserves in its own context. In Clarisse Bardiot’s work we see the particular care given to this documentation of the trace, where the document, by its content, and also by its publication, formatting and integration into a set of documentation, allows a hermeneutics of the trace, that is to say, the possibility of interpreting it and finding its hidden meaning, if we remember the traditional meaning of hermeneutics.
The documenting of the trace is, today, exploited by digital technologies that operate not on traces, not on documents, but on data. This terminological shift is a conceptual upheaval. For data are not and cannot be traces, nor can they be a document.
As we said, the trace is a survivor of the event. It is a vestige of it, what remains of it. Hence, its prestige relates to its supposed authenticity, its very aura, since it belongs to the order and origin from which it comes and to which it bears witness. The trace is a remnant – a selection and not a construction. Even if the selection does indeed imply something arbitrary, even if the trace is released and therefore, in some way, invented, it is, nevertheless, part of a material continuity with its original environment. It is, therefore, not a recording in the true sense of the word, for this implies a transformation of a thing’s nature, apart from the simple physical and material evolution of the trace. The recording projects an event into another reality. Consequently, the recording transforms, reconfigures and, in a certain way, distorts the event, to make what can no longer be called, properly speaking, a trace.
Recording raises the questions of what is recorded and of fidelity to what is recorded, i.e. the ability to use the recording as a record of something, with investigation making it possible to reconstruct or redefine what is recorded. If the recording is still a trace, it is through this link to the origin, this orientation toward the past event. However, from now on it must be analyzed not as what remains, but as the reconstruction of what happened. We often forget this characteristic of the recording, because it was created at the moment of the event’s occurrence, not afterwards. This simultaneity wrongly screens the recording from the same virtues of authenticity as the trace and the remnant. But for having both been contemporaneous with the event, the recording is nonetheless, unlike the trace, a reconstruction. Thus, the preserved recording is a trace of the recording that it was at the time of its creation, but it is not a trace of the recorded event, it is its recording.
The question of authenticity is a central notion in archival work, where it corresponds to the fact that a document is what it claims to be, It is also inescapable in other disciplines, such as esthetic conservation, where it is divided, among other things, between faithfulness to the author’s intent, conformity to a supposedly original state and consistency with the known history of the work. If the recording is not a trace, how can it be authentic? How can it function to give, to know, to contemplate or to share what the recording is? The modalities of the interpretation of the recording are thus to be constituted, our discussion wanting to show not that they do not exist, but that they are different from traces as vestiges.
Moreover, the recording is not a conforming image, it is not a reference copy, and it is not the freezing of a supposed identity. In some conservation practices, authenticity rests on the integrity of the object being preserved. However, in the case of digital technology, and in an exemplary manner in the context of the performing arts, integrity is not possible; it is immediately contested by two aspects: the binary resource allows reconstruction via an external code (the decoded content depends on the reading/decoding convention, and not only on the recorded content), the integrity of the resource therefore in no way guarantees the authenticity of the content. Moreover, obsolescence implies a necessary transformation of the coding, so that there is no physical identity between the different stages of the history of a content. Consequently, authenticity is not an objective, it is not a given, but a question, an interpretative rigor for questioning recordings that have lost their origin and cannot take their place. Authenticity is rather, as Clarisse Bardiot pointed out to me in the many discussions we had together, the fact of “not doing just anything about a work”.
But, since it is necessary to work on the recording to make the interpretation, it will be subjected to various treatments where it will function from now on as data, in particular, in the digital universe. Clarisse Bardiot shows that data are constructed, formatted, coded and collected for the processing that will be applied to them. Data are what we give to ourselves, what allows us to abstract from what there was before, in the arbitrary nature of a decree that establishes data as a starting point. The data are thus the antonym of the trace: what is laid down, and not what is left behind. To express it in a single phrase, the data are the amnesia of the trace, which erases its origin to subject it to its algorithmic future. While the trace is what remains, a survival of a past that has passed (hence the irrepressible nostalgia for the contemplation of traces or vestiges), the data are what augurs a calculated future.
This is the reason why Clarisse Bardiot proposes to speak about datatraces, to show that the data resulting from the recorded traces are not traces, or rather, perhaps, are no longer traces. It will therefore require all possible interpretative caution and hermeneutic sagacity in order to be able to make use of the results of the treatments applied to these datatraces, which Clarisse Bardiot calls metatraces, which offer reconstructed graphical views allowing a holistic and global understanding of the local data calculated.
Therefore, at the end of the various initiatives for the conservation of works, which sometimes leaves traces or vestiges, gives way to recordings, subsequently digitized in datatraces to be subjected to systematic treatments, and finally presented and studied in the form of metatraces, the road is very long between what is accessible to us and what we want to find. It is undoubtedly necessary that we reverse the perspective: instead of thinking that a primordial event is the key to the intelligibility of what follows, it is advisable to practice an interpretative asceticism where we rely on the remains, recordings, datatraces and metatraces to try to constitute the origin, or the origins, of the elements available today.
The work possesses an unassignable origin, an elusive identity, behind events that tear apart reality to leave traces, vestiges or recordings.
Clarisse Bardiot draws fundamental conclusions from these reflections and proposals. First, that the conservation of works cannot be limited to the preservation of data, on pain of losing their historicity, their original organic link. Second, that full archiving is both a mistake and an impossibility. Third, that using data means redocumenting traces, and giving them back a documentary meaning, namely, to be a document on the theatrical or artistic event. In this sense, her work is an essential contribution to understanding the impact of digital technology in the documentation of the performing arts. She knows how to use the heuristic value of the recording arts, or the question of recording in art, to understand what digital technology allows us to do with works, and what it does to those works. Her work is directly related to the digital humanities, by showing that no translation into data can avoid a hermeneutic path that assumes the global interpretation of traces.
Bruno BACHIMONTSorbonne UniversityMay 2021
Preface“Measuring” Merce Cunningham1
In the twilight of his life, in 2000, Merce Cunningham decided to organize the legacy and preservation of his work through the creation of the Merce Cunningham Trust – while calling for the dissolution of his company two years after his death. The mission of the Merce Cunningham Trust is “to preserve, enhance, and maintain the integrity of that choreographic and other artistic work, and make such works available for the benefit of the public”2. This approach is novel in many ways. On the one hand, it reflects an early, regular and intense concern and effort to document: David Vaughan was hired as an archivist by the company in 1976 (he has worked with the company since 1959 in various administrative and production positions, collecting documents informally). Since then, the company’s archives have been transferred to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library in two main phases, in 2001 and 2012. On the other hand, this approach calls into question the ephemeral nature of the performing arts: 86 works (out of 184 counted)3, documented in Dance Capsules, should, thanks to the archives gathered and made available to the public on the Internet4, be able to “be performed in perpetuity”5. The company is not the heir of the repertoire. On the contrary, the foundation promotes the widest possible dissemination of the works: anyone wishing to remount a Cunningham piece can do so, subject to the agreement of the Merce Cunningham Trust. In doing so, Dance Capsules define two groups of works: major works, which are the subject of extensive documentation and are intended for transmission; and minor works, whose documentation is not made available to the public and whose de facto revival is almost impossible to carry out.
One of Cunningham’s main contributions is to take dance out of any narrative or psychological reference. For him, dance is a fact: “what is seen, is what it is” (Cunningham 1952). This vision of dance resonates today as a call to apply quantitative methodologies to the analysis of his work. It is only one step to consider facts as data, and thus have the ability to “measure” Cunningham through an approach borrowed from the digital humanities. Starting with a concrete example, this preface is intended as a first heuristic approach to the manipulation of digital traces of the performing arts. This study on Merce Cunningham will serve as a breadcrumb trail to illustrate and discuss the various theoretical aspects outlined here, which are further developed elsewhere in various parts of this book.
The term “measurement” refers to a measurement instrument. I have used several of them, not in order to show the diversity of tools available to the researcher, but because different instruments make it possible to analyze different phenomena using different representations, even from the same data. As we will see in section 1.3.2, it is possible to distinguish two broad families of instruments: those that rely on a quantifiable approach such as statistics with measures expressed in numerical values (the number of dancers, documents, years spent in the company, etc.); and those that rely on a codifiable approach where what matters is the link between the data (the network of relationships between members of the company) rather than their numerical count. In other words, in this second approach, it is more important to know which dancers Cunningham collaborated with from 1953 to 2009 than the statistical evolution of their numbers. Metrics are not set out at the outset: they are reinvented, as it were, with each image, depending on the algorithms, parameters and other variables used to construct them, making it difficult to interpret the results. The three main instruments used to conduct an exploratory analysis of the Cunningham data are as follows: Gephi, for network representation; Palladio, for geographical and temporal representation; spreadsheets (Excel, LibreOffice, Datamatic), for statistical representations. All of them have in common the generation of images, more often called “data visualizations”. Intrinsically qualitative, they are the starting point for our analysis, hence the place they are given in the following pages. For Franco Moretti, “images are first: in fact, by offering a visualization of empirical results, they constitute the very object of study for computational criticism” (Moretti 2016, p. 10, author’s translation). If the images are first, they are only first because they are seen by an educated and informed eye that contributes to their morphogenesis. It is impossible to produce them, and even harder to “read” them, to go beyond the obvious and to identify anomalies without prior knowledge of the context or without expertise in the object under study.
Reliable and homogeneous but incomplete data
The data collected comes from the Merce Cunningham Trust website. They concern the casting of shows and the Dance Capsules as well as the life of the company6. Concerning casting, for each of the 184 shows, there are detailed names of the dancers, composers, lighting designers, costume designers and scenographers, the title of the musical composition, the date and place of creation, the running time of the show and a link to a Dance Capsule if necessary. The whole is completed by a short descriptive text. To this information, I have added the data related to the documentation of the works available for the Dance Capsules (number of documents related to the choreographer’s notes, video recordings, sound, photographs, programs and press reviews, costumes, stage management, lighting and décor), in order to study the documentary strategy implemented from the perspective of the transmission of the works. The documents themselves are subject to restricted access. The bias is to limit ourselves to public data: for the Dance Capsules documents, we know the number of documents in each category but do not have access to their content. Finally, I also relied on the list of dancers compiled by the Merce Cunningham Trust, which includes the company’s entry and departure dates for each dancer7.
The unique source of the data – the Merce Cunningham Trust – ensures high reliability and consistency. They take into account all works, not just major works. However, they are far from exhaustive. They do not include the 700 or so Events created by the company, with the exception of the first one in 1964, nor do they include the transmission of choreographies to other companies or corps de ballets, and are limited to the cast of each premiere. However, the works have often been performed by other dancers and have been the subject of restagings. Moreover, this data is very fragmented: information about production (stage managers, administrators and other behind-the-scenes professionals), the presentation of the works (texts, photographs, other documents published in the hall programs) and the graphics of the original document (typography, layout, proportion of visuals to text, etc.) have disappeared. The following pages should be read as the first step of a work in progress, with a first sample of data.
The data were entered into a spreadsheet, with some “clean-up” measures required, for example, for names of persons (spelling, maiden and married names). Another source was used to verify some of the details: David Vaughan’s book Merce Cunningham, 65 Years, published in digital format (Vaughan 2012)8. This true sum retraces in detail the journey of Cunningham, work after work.
Despite the above restrictions, the dataset includes 184 creations from 1938 to 2009, including 85 Dance Capsules9 and 341 different people. The data collected falls into three main categories: data on individuals, works and documentation. From these elements, can we identify typical features, characteristics of the company’s history and life, Cunningham’s esthetics and strategies for documenting the works?
Tracing the history of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Let us consider the data related to the casting of the works as well as the commitments of the company’s dancers. Can they lead to the identification of historical markers and the identification of patterns that recur or differentiate between periods? To begin, let us establish two broad temporal and spatial visions of the company’s life. Figure P.1a shows the evolution of the number of creations as well as the number of dancers per year. This reveals various characteristics of Cunningham’s career. The first is a high level of creativity throughout the choreographer’s career. However, the orange line, showing the evolution of the number of creations, presents far from a consistent trajectory. Periods of intense creativity follow or precede less prolific periods. Three periods can be identified. The beginning, from 1938 to 1953, is marked by numerous creations, until 1953 where there were nine, the year of the company’s birth. As we will see in this preface, these nine are numerous short solos, choreographed and performed by Merce Cunningham. However, from 1997 onward, the creations are more sporadic: these years are those of the big and numerous tours abroad involving presentation of the repertoire and its transmission. Between these two poles (before 1953 and after 1997), the life of the company is marked by peaks of creativity, with sometimes up to five new creations per year.
Throughout 71 years, only six years do not include a new show at the beginning and end of the course, as well as in 1962 and 1974. A look at David Vaughan’s book for these different years gives the following details: 1940 and 1941 were the years when Merce Cunningham was a dancer in Martha Graham’s company and at the same time attended classes at the School of American Ballet – a period of apprenticeship, with many engagements, not very conducive to personal creativity. According to David Vaughan, 1962 was the period of the happenings and performances at Judson Church. While Cunningham collaborated on some of these events, their “unclassifiable” nature meant that they were not created as choreographic works in their own right. 1974 was a year marked by the realization of several events and above all by the exploration of choreography for camera, which led to the creation of a video creation, Westbeth, in collaboration with Charles Atlas. Completed in the fall of 1974, it was presented to the public in February 1975 (it was therefore “counted” in 1975). 2005 and 2008 are two years with a particularly busy agenda in terms of tours and international recognition.
The second characteristic of Cunningham’s career is the correlation between the historical markers of the number of creations and the number of dancers in the company. Not only do the numbers of creations and dancers generally increase simultaneously, but the breakaway indices are identical. The period prior to 1953 is marked by wide disparities in the evolution of the number of dancers in the company: for the first four years, Merce Cunningham was solo; then the very first group pieces in 1944, 1947, 1950 and 1952 resulted in “peaks” in the number of dancers until 1944, when there were 17 dancers in total. Paradoxically, the creation of the company, with 14 dancers, was marked by a freefall, with as many as six dancers in 1956. The early years were economically very fragile, invitations for performances were hard to come by, and many dancers decided to leave the company in the face of a lack of stable prospects. The 1960s were a decade of fundamental construction, with the first tours in Europe10. From 1967 onwards, the company would never again have fewer than 10 dancers, and from 1976 never fewer than 14 dancers. In a state of constant growth, it reached 22 dancers in 1993, before declining. From 1953 to 2009, the company averaged 14 dancers, the same number as at its inception.
The third characteristic of the company’s evolution was a steady increase in the number of dancers, while the number of creations tended to decline. The inversion of the trend lines leads us to the following hypothesis: the further one advances in time, the more the main activity becomes the diffusion of the repertoire, to the detriment of creation11.
What about the careers of dancers in the company? Figure P.1b presents the length of each dancer’s collaboration with Merce Cunningham, as a function of when they joined the company. A calculation of the average tells us that each dancer stayed for five and a half years. This figure covers wide disparities: many dancers, until 1960, stayed for only one year. Four “faithful” companions then accompanied Cunningham: Marianne Preger-Simon, Remy Charlip, Viola Farber and Carolyn Brown.
After 1960, the commitments were increasingly long-lasting, as shown by the trend line, with some examples of exceptional longevity: Robert Swinston (32 years), Chris Komar (25 years), Carolyn Brown (20 years), Viola Farber (14 years), Alan Good (17 years) and Lisa Boudreau (15 years). Although Merce Cunningham danced himself until 1999, at the age of 80 years, and as a dancer he created 119 works, he was not the only guarantor of continuity within the company. On a regular basis, in cycles of about 7 years, one or two dancers joined the company for at least 13 years. Through their longevity and involvement in creation, they served as a bridge between different generations, as well as between transient and long-lasting dancers. This central role would be recognized: after his career as a dancer was over, Chris Komar remained employed with the company as assistant artistic director of the Merce Cunningham Company. Robert Swinston became assistant to the choreographer in 1992 (he joined in 1980), in addition to his role as a dancer in the company.
After a chronological view in Figures P.1a and P.1b, Figure P.1c shows a geographical representation of the company’s history. It synthesizes all of Merce Cunningham’s travels from 1938 to 2009 for the creations and does not take into account tours with repertoire pieces or Events. The tangle of lines shows a very high density of exchanges on both sides of the Atlantic, with two major poles of attraction: New York, where Merce Cunningham settled in 1939, and France, where he choreographed three pieces as early as 1949 and whose role was crucial for his international recognition. It was in Sweden in 1958 that the company made its European debut. It did not perform a creation in France until 1966 (at the Fondation Maeght). Thereafter, several French institutions (Théâtre de la Ville, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Opéra national de Paris, Festival d’Avignon, etc.) regularly invited Cunningham to create new works. The role of France in his career is marked by his only creation outside the company, that of Un jour ou deux, a piece for 26 dancers of the Paris Opera in 1973, commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris and the Paris International Dance Festival.
Figure P.1.Explorations of Merce Cunningham Dance Company data from 1938 to 2009. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/bardiot/digitaltraces.zip
COMMENT ON FIGURE P.1.– a) Change in number of creations and number of dancers per year. b) Duration of dancers’ careers in the Merce Cunningham Company. c) Mapping of Merce Cunningham’s travels (for creations only)12.
This first exploration of the data allows us to bring out some historical markers in Cunningham’s career, by linking visual representations and biographical elements: 1953 and the creation of the company, 1974 with the exploration of video, the end of the 1990s and the 2000s favoring the exploitation of the repertory on creation, the importance of exchanges with Europe, etc. Each visual salience becomes a clue that raises a question: why these pauses in creation? Why this break in 1953? David Vaughan’s detailed work, year by year, proves to be an extremely valuable aid: it makes it possible to explain the phenomena observed, in a constant back-and-forth between the overview and the detail, between the macro and the micro. The small mechanics of the digital humanities, alternating quantitative measurement and qualitative interpretation, is put in place from the outset.
However, one has the right to wonder: what does this statistical analysis bring, when in the end, the information is already published in a wonderfully illustrated book? On the one hand, it shows that these visualizations, despite limited data, are not “wrong”. They corroborate already known facts. Above all, this approach provides an overall, synthetic vision: it allows us to observe at a single glance seven decades of a dense and rich career, whereas David Vaughan’s account, year after year, work after work, dotted line after dotted line, does not offer a global perspective. It is up to the reader to deduce it, if they have read the book scrupulously.
On the other hand, this analysis proposes another approach to Cunningham’s career, one that is more socio-economic (even if only sketched out) than artistic. Indeed, his career is more readily analyzed in esthetic terms, with four major determining events: the separation of music from dance and his collaboration with Cage (1940s), the use of chance procedures to choreograph (1950s), the work for video and camera (1970s) and the discovery of computer science (1990s). Although we have identified the third phenomenon, the others are not visible in this first analysis. It is other aspects that emerge, more related to the evolution and organization of the company than to the works themselves.
The data reveal a major break in Cunningham’s work: 1953 and the creation of the company. Can we identify and characterize different modalities of collaboration before and after 1953? The diagrams presented in Figure P.1 focus on individual paths. They omit the relationships between the company’s collaborators.
To understand these relationships, one must turn to network representation. This allows us to measure the links between people connected by performances. The “Cunningham network” can be visualized over time and thus constitute a dynamic cartography in order to detect the importance of each actor, to bring together key people, even communities and possibly ruptures in the modes of collaboration13.
Figure P.2a shows Merce Cunningham’s overall relationships (again, only for the premieres of his shows) from 1938 to 2009. We have retained all the people, including those who “collaborated” beyond temporal contingencies: thus for Erik Satie, who died in 1925. These are exceptions, Cunningham working mostly with contemporary composers. The graph includes 350 nodes and 4,633 edges14. The nodes represent people, color-coded according to their role and the edges the shows’ premieres. The size of the circles is proportional to the number of collaborations.
To simplify visualization, the functions of the costume designer, set designer and lighting designer have been merged into a single category, “scenographer”. If a person occupies more than one function, his or her name appears several times. This is the case for Merce Cunningham, who acted as choreographer, dancer and scenographer. The algorithm used is Force Atlas.
The first visual highlight is the centrality of the network, organized unsurprisingly around Merce Cunningham. The second is the presence of three concentric circles (with the exception of the first left quarter of the diagram): some composers (John Cage, David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, David Behrman and Christian Wolff), then the dancers and finally a third circle composed of scenographers and composers.
The presence of these three concentric circles calls into question the image we have of Cunningham: that of a choreographer who separates dance from music and whose collaboration with the most famous 20th century visual artists is central. Collaborations with the visual arts (Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, etc.) appear here as ad hoc, peripheral.
Figure P.2.Representations of the relationships between Merce Cunningham and his various collaborators by taking into account only the premieres of the shows. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/bardiot/digitaltraces.zip
COMMENT ON FIGURE P.2. – Blue: choreographer; orange: composer; pink: dancer; green: scenographer. a) Network from 1938 to 2009. b) Network after August 1953. c) Network from 1938 to July 195315.
The exceptions are Robert Rauschenberg, a “regular” collaborator for 24 shows, as well as the visual artist and set designer Mark Lancaster, and the lighting designer Aaron Copp for 13 shows. Collaboration cannot be evaluated solely by the number of shows created, even if this remains an important and eminently quantifiable indicator: Mark Lancaster was assistant to Andy Warhol and then Jasper Johns, as well as a visual artist in contact with the entire New York art scene in the 1960s and 1970s, before being the company’s artistic advisor for nearly a decade, until 1984. Not all of these relationships are reflected in the visualization, as Mark Lancaster did not collaborate with Andy Warhol, and only once with Jasper Johns (although the latter intervened 10 times for the company) in the context of Cunningham’s shows.
In Figure P.2a, part of the upper graph is organized into different clusters while the lower graph is much more regular. The organization in three concentric circles disappears – or rather does not appear yet – in favor of an organization in subgroups, or even in a nebula. This part of the graph corresponds to the early years of Cunningham’s career, before and at the time of the founding of the company in August 1953 at Black Mountain College. We have therefore separated the data to create two graphs corresponding to the periods 1938–1953 and 1953–2009 (Figures P.2b and P.2c). In the first graph, the network consists of 121 nodes and 841 edges. A star structure appears, with the organization of groups isolated from each other and whose central connection point is Merce Cunningham. Cunningham then worked with different entities: Black Mountain College (an institution characterized by the presence of a majority of visual artists) in 1948, 1952 and 1953, or groups of dancers with whom he created works during workshops in universities. Most of the time, these collaborations are determined in space and time, and are not renewed. They are all the more visible as this period, as we shall see, is dominated by solos – group pieces being the exception. It is also a period marked by numerous collaborations with composers (23), most of the time for a single performance, with the exception of John Cage, already very present (24 compositions from 1938 to 1953).
After the creation of the company, the structure of the network, which includes 243 nodes and 3,831 edges, is very different: it takes the form of an almost homogenous spiral (Figure P.2b), which unfolds around the choreographer Merce Cunningham and from “pivot” dancers. This distribution also corresponds to a chronological view, from 1954 in the upper half to 2009 at the end of the spiral (top left of the graph). Pivot dancers participated in a significant number of creations and provide an opportunity to connect with other dancers whose time in the company is shorter. With the exception of Cunningham himself, they are, in chronological order, Carolyn Brown, Catherine Kerr, Chris Komar, Alan Good, Robert Swinston and Lisa Boudreau. Un jour ou deux, Cunningham’s only collaboration with dancers from outside his company, appears distinctly in the figures as a nebulous outgrowth.
Although both these figures are centered around Merce Cunningham, the transformation of the star into a spiral means they require two very different ways of working. Before 1953, Merce Cunningham danced in almost all his creations, with the exception of Duet in 1949 and Rag-Time Parade in 1950. He had multiple collaborations with composers, and already engaged in regular work with John Cage. To a lesser extent, he met visual artists (mainly at Black Mountain College). In fact, he had a particular role in costume creation along with Remy Charlip, also a dancer. Concerning the performers, he worked with different groups, which were not very connected to each other, even though the first members of his company are already present in the diagram (Carolyn Brown, Anita Dencks, Viola Farber, Timothy LaFarge, Paul Taylor and Ethel Brodsky).
After 1954, the modalities of working with the performers were radically different: with one exception, Merce Cunningham did not create works for dancers other than those of his own company. Collaborations with visual artists were eclectic (much more so than with composers) but constant. John Cage retains a predominant place for music, but other regular composers, already mentioned, make their appearance. The location of certain collaborators, such as Rauschenberg, Cage or Christian Wolff, in the upper left quarter, is typical of the following phenomenon: these collaborators, present at the beginning and at the end of their careers, make the link between the very first and the very last creations of the company. To give just one example, Rauschenberg mainly created scenographies from 1954 to 1964, but returned in 1977, 2000 and 2007.
The star network is not only synonymous with a centralized but also more fragmented organization, with diverse and watertight groups; the spiral network, on the other hand, presents a single group evolving in an organic, fluid way; integrating newcomers without creating a clear break with the older members. The collective seems to take precedence over the individual, continuity over the moment. The passage from star to spiral takes place during the pivotal year that constitutes the creation of the company. For Cunningham, the company seems to be the ideal tool to undertake relationships that will unfold over the long term. This is also the case for dancers, even though the physical demands of the discipline mean that other dancers must take over their roles more frequently. “Pivotal dancers” bridge the gap between generations of dancers and between works.
This approach, by showing the importance of certain dancers, referred to as “pivotal dancers”, in the organization of the company, led us to study more precisely the place of these dancers within the company. It is by no means negligible: the history of dance has focused more on collaborations between dance and music or between dance and the visual arts, to analyze Cunningham’s work rather than the life of the company itself and especially of the dancers. With the exception of a few celebrities, the dancers are drowned out by the term “performer” and struggle to earn a name for themselves. The digital humanities also make this possible: the possibility of restoring a place for those forgotten in the history of the performing arts.
Esthetic indications
So far, we have used the data related to the shows’ cast, which has allowed us to deepen our knowledge of company life. Let us move on to the data related to the works. This includes the number of dancers in each creation, the length of a choreography and the distinction between minor and major works. Is it possible to recognize a Merce Cunningham’s signature style through quantitative measures? Can quantitative data reveal information of an esthetic nature? We have a valuable indicator: the works documented in the capsules, as opposed to those that are not.
With the creation of the Dance Capsules, two groups of works are constituted, of unequal symbolic value while their size is similar. The first one (85 choreographies) is that of the “iconic” works, to use the website’s term. Because they are major choreographies, having marked the history of contemporary dance, they are documented in the Dance Capsules. By grouping together the reference works, they define the canon of Cunningham’s work. The second group (99 choreographies) includes works outside the canon. Secondary, in the first sense of the word, they enjoy neither the same prestige nor the same posterity. They form the group of so-called minor works. Rather than this pejorative term, we use the term auxiliary. With this term, we implicitly hypothesize that these works are steps toward the elaboration of the choreographies that constitute the canon. From now on, we will refer to these two groups as the canon and the auxiliary, the corpus designating the set of works.
The running time of the works is particularly important in the case of Cunningham’s works. The mastery of duration and rhythm is indeed an essential parameter for his performers, trained to dance without musical references (Louppe 2010, pp. 99–102). In a text that has become famous, the choreographer defines dance as an art of “space and time”, in which he calls for “a formal structure based on time” (Cunningham 1952). Time is the common denominator of dance and music, allowing them to juxtapose without one illustrating the other or vice versa. These principles, at the basis of Cunningham’s thought and forged in dialog with John Cage, were laid down from the earliest years.
The change in the length of shows is significant (Figure P.3a), although this data remains unknown for 35 of them. The overall trend is toward an increase in length, with a very large amplitude and variety, far from the current standard of about 50 minutes: 1 hour 30 minutes for Un jour ou deux and Ocean, compared to 2 minutes for The Unavailable Memory of ... Despite the use of chance to compose the works, it seems that this method has been used more to determine the duration of movements or phrases within a given total duration than to define the latter.
It is indeed possible to observe certain constants. Before 1953, the pieces are generally very short, less than 10 minutes long. If we refer to Figure P.3a, these are very often solos. Four Walls, with a running time of 1 hour, is an exception. Choreographed in 1944 for a group of 16 dancers, it is Cunningham’s first group piece. The 1960s were marked by the exploration of long forms, longer than 45 minutes, culminating in the creation of Un jour ou deux in 1973. From the 1970s onward, the half-hour format became the recurring model. It is also the one that is imposed in the works of the canon. The accumulation of very short pieces at the beginning of a career, and later the creation of pieces around 30 minutes long, involved programs composed of several works for the same evening. This practice presupposes repertoire: for each new “dance concert”, the company takes up previous works, while often proposing a new creation. It also contains the germ of Events, which combine short pieces, fragments of shows and original sequences for unique creations in situ, generally outside theaters. The first of its kind, Museum Event, in 1964, lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Changes in work length overlap with changes in form (Figure P.3b): the general increase in performance length is matched by an increase in the number of dancers. Yet, in contrast to length, the two parallel trend lines show that the canon and the auxiliary follow a similar growth pattern for the evolution in form from solo to group work. The only difference is that the canon has a few more performers than the auxiliary. In other words, the most famous works are also those that have – on average – the most performers. This being the case, the solo, with 40 creations, is the dominant form. Two other configurations were favored by Cunningham: sextets (20 works) and pieces with between 13 and 15 dancers (39 works). Surprisingly, classical forms such as the duo, trio or quartet are rare. Although he did not devote a specific choreography to them, the choreographer developed these forms within the group works.
The identified dominant forms (solo, sextet and groups of 13–15 dancers) correspond to different stages in the life of the company. The solo is mostly characteristic of the beginning of Cunningham’s career and becomes secondary from 1957, although he used it occasionally until 1979 with 50 Looks, and he systematically interpreted it. The only exceptions are two works created in 1960 for Carolyn Brown, the leading dancer in the company’s first 20 years. In the solos, Merce Cunningham investigated and constructed his own corporeality, in search of his own language. It was with the solo that he laid the foundations of his esthetic, before passing it on to other dancers. He regularly felt the need to return to this experimental form, “one of the great innovations of contemporary dance”, an “inevitable rite of passage” (Louppe 2010, pp. 205–206) according to Laurence Louppe, as if it were a means of nourish collective creations. After some 15 years of relentless experimentation, mostly devoted to solo work, Cunningham composed 11 sextets from 1953 to 1959, one after the other, most of which remained in his repertoire for a long time (Suite by Chance, Banjo, Springweather and People, Nocturnes, Picnic Polka, Labyrinthian Dances, Antic Meet, Summerspace, From the Poems of White Stone, Gambit for Dancers and Orchestra, and Rune). This form reflected the hard core of the company’s dancers while allowing for the integration of new performers, who took over parts of those members who had left the Merce Cunningham Company. It is the format of transmission, of sharing, after the solos that have enabled it to develop its vocabulary. It is a first step, before tackling, from the 1970s onwards, pieces for between 10 and 15 performers, a format he favored until the end of his career.
By deliberately choosing the term “auxiliary” to qualify the second group of works, those of the so-called minor works, we have presumed that these were steps toward the canon. The phenomenon is very clear when one analyzes the place of the solo both in relation to Cunningham’ work as a whole and in relation to the Dance Capsules. There are very few solos in the canon because they are auxiliary links that allowed Merce Cunningham to construct his own language16.
In spite of all the reservations that one can legitimately have about a quantitative approach applied to the esthetic analysis of works, we have just shown that data, even when summarized, contain such information. It is thus possible to define Cunningham’s “style” as a work of 30 minutes, which in the 1969s was a sextet, and from the 1970s onwards was a piece for 13 to 15 dancers; as a work whose language was developed in solos before being subsequently transmitted in group pieces. This stylistic signature is of a very general nature, and it is not a question of conducting a meticulous analysis of a choreography. The approach proves interesting when it allows us to identify patterns, recurrences, trends, or to spot anomalies. From this point of view, the show Un jour ou deux appears to be a record: the only creation made outside the company after it was founded and the second in terms of the number of dancers and its running time, etc.
Documentation strategies
The data we have considered are original. These are data from the Dance Capsules, which contain valuable information on how these works can be documented. This work has been carried out with a stated concern for the transmission of the works. The home page of the website on which the capsules can be accessed (some are free, some after requesting authorization) states their purpose: “So that future generations can study and perform these works with knowledge of how they originally came to life”17. For each show, a collection of documents is grouped by category, with a selection of photographs highlighted. The term “capsule” suggests coherence: each set contains documents that respond to each other and guide reading of the work. A capsule does not include the entire archive of a work, but a selection, made with the aim to transmit it to other companies. The Merce Cunningham Trust, the publisher of this documentary work, also manages the licenses to ensure that any revival of the work respects the original creation: the former dancers of the company are responsible for accompanying the dissemination of the archives to other dancers. Their body memory, the living archive they have become, makes a link between the documents.
The first overview of the documentation strategy (Figure P.3c) shows both the moment when a capsule is created in relation to the works as a whole, and the total number of documents for each capsule. The period prior to the creation of the company is very little documented. This reflection ties in with our questioning of the relationship between the canon and the auxiliary. In this particular case, it is quite possible that the near-absence of a capsule during this period does not correspond to the absence of major works, but to an absence of documentation: only four works are the subject of a capsule and the documents gathered are few in number. On the contrary, the creation of the company seems to signify the beginning of documentation, as if its birth also instituted the creation of a repertory, and that the preservation of the latter was achieved through documentation. The number of documents available per work is very disparate (12 documents for Dime a Dance versus 197 documents for Antic Meet). It shows a general tendency to increase over time.
Figure P.3.Explorations of Merce Cunningham Dance Company data from 1938 to 2009. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/bardiot/digitaltraces.zip
COMMENT ON FIGURE P.3. – a) Evolution of the length of performances (ordinate: length of the performance, in minutes; abscissa: chronology). b) Form of the works, from solo to group piece (ordinate: number of dancers; abscissa: chronology). c) Nature of the documentation for each Dance Capsule (ordinate: number of documents; abscissa: performances in chronological order)18.
What is documented? The Dance Capsules documents are grouped by categories: choreographic notes (from Cunningham’s personal notebooks), video, sound, photos, press and programs, costumes, stage management, lighting and décor. A document entitled “Overview” includes information about credits, performance, repertoire and revivals, date and place of creation, as well as some brief information about the choreography itself (running time, music, minimum configuration required for the stage, brief description of the costumes, etc.). This document is public, as is a selection of photographs and in most cases a brief musical and/or video excerpt, sometimes a complete recording, or documentary videos presenting, for example, filmed interviews with Merce Cunningham.
All the documents gathered concern at the same time the creation process (via the choreographer’s notebooks), the finished show itself with the various elements necessary for its performance (lighting, costumes, stage management, décor, sound) and possibly its various restagings (via photos and videos), as well as its dissemination and reception (press and programs). Thus, for the Cunningham Trust, these three dimensions of the performing arts, or more precisely these three phases, are necessary to be able to transmit choreography.
Let us go into details about each phase (Figure P.3c). Downstream and upstream, the creation process and reception are each subject to only one category of documentation: the choreographer’s notes for the former, the press review and the programs for the latter. Merce Cunningham’s19 notebooks are handwritten traces that include elements of movement notation according to a system of its own (Laban notation will only be used in exceptional cases). They are essential for understanding the composition of the movement and the articulation of the different parts of the body between them. Only Cunningham’s notes are presented, not those of his assistants or collaborators20. The constitution of the archives reflects the organization of the company around Merce Cunningham. Along with the notebooks, the press review and the programs are documents commonly found in performing arts collections. The press review allows us to witness the reception of the work at its creation, then during its tour and its eventual restagings. The programs are precious for retracing the life of the company: the data on which we have worked for the history and esthetics of the works are derived from them. They also give indications on the context in which the piece was created, and even on its artistic intent.
