October 17, 2006

Merce Cunningham Puts Music Selection in Audience Hands

Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed eyeSpace last week at The Joyce Theater.

Randomness in music selection was taken to new heights by the master of randomness. Audience members were encouraged to bring their own iPods loaded with Mikel Rouse’s eyeSpace score (freely available via the Merce Cunningham website for ticket buyers) or those without iPods were provided with one when arriving at The Joyce theater.

Apollinaire Scherr wrote in Newsday before opening of eyeSpace:

Up until "eyeSpace," audience members at least were listening to the same music, whatever they each made of it. Now, they may be watching the same dance, "but they're having a private experience with the sound," Rouse explains. "What happens when you ask people to have both a shared and a private experience at the same time? I don't think that's exactly happened before. The question is, what is a theatrical experience?"

I just did Google news search to see what the reviewers had to say about eyeSpace and its iPod innovation:

Tobi Tobias for Bloomber writes in "Merce Cunningham's IPod Tricks Fall Flat":

Now, with ``eyeSpace,'' Cunningham is inviting his audience to be interactive, a tactic that presumably engages the art-resistant. This from an artist who stuck to his esoteric aesthetic for decades, often with glorious results.

The choreography for ``eyeSpace'' is even more discouraging than the sound gimmickry.

Deborah Jowitt in The Village Voice opens her review:

Merce Cunningham and John Cage were using chance procedures to shuffle music and dance sequences before Steve Jobs was born. With Cunningham's new eyeSpace, the audience gets to play. We hear half of Mikel Rouse's score, variously shuffled, on iPods. Text sung and spoken by the dancers (sample: "I almost lost my foot, but I didn't lose my foot") emerges from a murmur of instruments and other sounds. Rouse and Stephan Moore also generate noise on the theater's speakers—mostly street and subway clamor. Sitting there in our headphones we might be on the subway, except that no musical favorites cocoon us from commotion.

This aural experience is somewhat like life; the visual one isn't.

John Rockwell for the New York Times writes in "You'll Take the Dance You're Given, but You Can Call the Tune":

...“eyeSpace,� accompanied by a Mikel Rouse score set to shuffle mode on individual iPods, was [a] novelty, and an appealing one.

Mr. Cunningham, now 87, has long been fascinated with technological innovations, and there can be a whiff of gimmickry in his use of them. The new “eyeSpace� worked well, with one reservation. Mr. Rouse’s score blends rock and folk-rockish vocals with electronic instrumentals and an urban soundscape. The handsome blue costumes and backdrop — blue against an intensely saturated red — are by Henry Samelson. The 12 dancers twisted and gyrated, mostly in subgroups of diminishing size, though one’s attention was sometimes distracted by the novelty of Mr. Rouse’s presentation of his music and by the audience fumbling with the iPods, most of which were on loan from the lobby.

Click here for more reviews on Google.

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