With Daniel Squire on Cunningham in Ostrava

Merce Cunningham’s dance technique and his choreographies form one of the pillars of modern and contemporary dance. His company belongs among the top dance bodies, showing their performances all around the world. And it is one of the former members of the famous Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Daniel Squire, who has arrived to the capital of the Moravian-Silesian region to rehearse one segment of the triptych event entitled Cunningham Tribute with the NMST ballet ensemble. The performances will take place on 24th September at the Antonín Dvořák Theatre and on 28th September at the New Stage in Prague. The evening in three parts (besides the group piece for NMST Ballet, it will feature Squire himself and dancer Nicole Morel) is conceived as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Cunningham Company’ performances in Ostrava and Prague. During his residence in Ostrava, full of intensive rehearsals and preparations for the show, Daniel made time for a meeting with the public and a workshop for amateur as well as professional dancers. Both sessions were held on 15th September in the Multi-disciplinary Contemporary Arts Centre Cooltour, in a slightly unconventional way. They were based on experiments resulting in unattended, but original, situations, similarly to Merce Cunningham’s pieces. Those who expected a common lecture with illustrative videos and subsequent discussion might have been a little surprised. Daniel Squire was inspired by his experience with lecturing to students in Ohio and by one of the performances created by Cunningham and John Cage (composer and philosopher, Cunningham’s close friend and collaborator), which involved speakers reading texts of different lengths, always within the time limit of one minute, and sometimes simultaneously, so that they became almost incomprehensible for the audience. As you have already worked with the ballet ensemble of the NMST, how does it feel this time to rehearse with the dancers? Can you see any progress, any change?  Yes, I worked on a very brief project last year for the Ostrava Days new-music festival, run by Petr Kotik. For that project I used 19 dancers, plus myself, and a cleaning lady from the theatre who happened to be there during the tech rehearsal so became part of the show. Then there were about 12 musicians and Petr conducting. Many of the dancers were members of NDM/NMST, and of those there are 7 who auditioned for this year’s project, all of whom are in it, plus one more from NDM/NMST and Nicole Morel, a former dancer from Ballett am Rhein in Düsseldorf where I assisted staging a Merce work (Scenario from 1997) earlier this year.  This time around we have three and a half weeks to prepare, whereas last time it was only 4 days including the audition, so I am able to be much more specific with the dancers about what I would like them to do/show/attempt. Last year’s piece—of necessity—included much live choice from the dancers about the rhythms, tempi, and even which phrases or parts of phrases they showed during performance. I think a lot of the dancers this time around expected to have that freedom again, so it’s been a bit of a surprise for them. Not one they can’t handle, though. You have collaborated with many dance companies. What are the main difficulties you‘ve come across when introducing the dancers into the Cunningham technique and his way of working with movement and musical accompaniment?  First of all I must be clear that for this project, I have not been working with Merce’s technique, or movements. There might be some vocabulary in common, but there is also vocabulary in common with George Balanchine, Michael Clark, Isadora Duncan, Louis XIV and any three-year old dancing around their living room alone. None of it is intentionally derivative, but we’re working with the same tools, so…  When I have worked on Cunningham Technique and on Merce’s repertory with companies, the challenges vary greatly. Sometimes the biggest challenge is encouraging the dancers to move away from an idea of “presenting” the choreography or prioritising the “front” in a proscenium-stage situation; giving them permission to primarily “do what they’re doing”, (if I may paraphrase Merce’s words), rather than striving for an intended result or presentation as they might previously have understood dance/performance. Other times the challenge is finding a way for them to be able to move quickly without diminshing the scale of movement, to cover space, be off-balance and catch the weight instead of playing it “safe” and staying on their standing leg the whole time; to get them to push beyond what they think is possible, so that, in Merce’s words, “You have to do something to get out of it”. When creating your own choreographies, where do you seek inspiration?  For У / Я, the duet I am making here, I have sought inspiration in Sol Lewitt’s Drawing Series, as shown at DIA:Beacon in New York State, where Merce’s company gave Events for a weekend every three months during the last two years of his life. One of Lewitt’s work takes as a premise twenty possible lines through a square, and then combines two lines at a time, with a very rigourously logical order, until all the possibilities have been exhausted. I have applied the same logical order to space, positions, facings, arm movements, and then we explore all of the possibilities of combining any two elements until not only the possibilities but also Nicole and I are exhausted.  For the solo, These then were the perverse – perverse’s the werd – steps he deveyesed, I have taken inspiration from Georges Perec’s writing. He wrote a piece called Les Revenentes, which Ian Monk translated for Harvill Press, in which only the vowel “e” is employed. Spelling becomes increasingly unorthodox as the writing progresses, and I decided to make a dance in which I never intentionally bend any of my limbs. As the piece goes on, I perform a series of tasks during which one would be increasingly likely to bend one’s limbs if that were permitted.  For the third piece, I was very interested to see what would happen in I created movement that was almost reliant upon the music. It was a golden opportunity to work with 30 Sonic Youth songs without having to pay for rights, since the songs will not appear in public: only the dance manifestation of them. I was also seeking to make a dance in which all the dancers have complete equality. They all perform the same 30 dance phrases once each. They have their own path and wing, which puts some upstage and others downstage. Some people might view that as a hierarchy of sorts, but their placement was determined by chance, not by my preferences, or who I thought the audience might prefer to have closer to them. Written from a meeting held on 15th September 2014 in the Multi-disciplinary Arts Centre Cooltour Ostrava. Author: Tereza Cigánková Photo: Martin Popelář

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