Cunningham’s Computerized Works Click on Several Levels

At a time when dancers have reached an almost superhuman level of control and stamina, Merce Cunningham is asking them to be more than just superhuman--he’s asking them to be software.

Experimenting with the computer animation program LifeForms since the beginning of the ‘90s, Cunningham has learned to bypass familiar motion patterns: the ways that gravity and our musculature dictate transitions between movements, for example, or how placements of the arms help sustain a balance. Just as an electronic synthesizer can create violin music that no actual violin could ever play, Cunningham’s computer-dancers are free of physical limits, setting his imagination free as well.

Transferred to the 15 bodies of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in two programs at UCLA over the weekend, the results proved continually startling: off-center balances held indefinitely with arms that seemed to come out of shoulders backward, jumps in which a delicate movement accent or flicker took place in midair and, especially, an emphasis on pure design that felt liberating rather than oppressive, despite the effort and occasional small failures getting there. Welcome to Cunningham 4.0, where all sorts of possibilities and languages become compressed and redefined.

Take “CRWDSPCR,” on both the Friday and Saturday programs at Royce Hall, a title computer-condensed from “Crowdspacer” and which Cunningham interpreted in terms of both space (“Crowd Spacer”) and time (“Crowds Pacer”). Accompanied by abrasive-unto-assaultive sound bursts by John King, the piece looked two-dimensional against its aqua light field, with Mark Lancaster’s patchwork costumes giving each of the 13 dancers an individual color scheme. But they didn’t move as individuals--they streaked in crowds through rapid tasks paced almost as discontinuously as the score, looking anonymous and sometimes nearly disembodied in their sharp torso twists and spasmodic jumps-with-kicks, a step that at one point morphed into 27 bounds in place: child’s play for cartoon-dancers, a mite taxing for mere humans.

In “Windows,” performed Friday, a John Cage backdrop that evoked a Chinese scroll painting and overlapping sonic textures by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta (echoing tones, dripping water) heightened the contrasts between serene stillness and constant, almost random activity. Some motifs involved the 14 dancers holding their arms in curves or “breaking” their torsos to the side but others deployed them in seated tableaux: contemplative poses in which Suzanne Gallo’s costumes (brownish unitards sponged with silver-gray) gave them the patina of metal sculptures.

Dancing against pools of Roy Lichtenstein dots, “Pond Way” found 14 of them dressed in Gallo’s loose, white body wraps that left parts of arms, legs and torsos fleetingly exposed. Electronic crickets and other environmental sound-painting in a moody score by Brian Eno created a potent sense of atmosphere while the choreography focused on isolation: keeping the dancers alone in a crowd, even when executing the same movements. A jump with the feet held together at the ankle returned often enough to qualify as a motif, but the rhythmic filling and emptying of space ultimately loomed larger, with the piece ending in a dynamic assembly/dispersal sequence: the dancers running and leaping offstage, one by one, until only Lichtenstein’s dots remained.

Saturday’s “Ground Level Overlay” boasted haunting trumpet washes by Stuart Dempster, a backdrop of tangled flotsam by Leonardo Drew and black-on-black Gallo costumes with many distinctive textures but a common elegance. Cunningham here explored changes of level: the 15 dancers seated on the floor, or on their knees, or standing, bent over, or being carried by others, or leaping through the air. The transitions to and from those levels often proved especially inventive and, as usual, the control of movement detail stayed spectacular down to the tiniest hip twitch.

In the two-part “Rondo,” to music by Cage, the 15 dancers went from bathing suits in different styles and colors to uniformly black-and-white play clothes designed by Gallo and Cunningham; from springy, idiosyncratic, virtuoso feats to group statements with an emphasis on unusual partnering relationships and hopping steps. Computer-inspired innovation made the piece an adventure from first to last--but with a sense of warmth and humor always in evidence.

At both performances, musicians-technicians Paul DeMarinis, Takehisa Kosugi, Mike Van Sleen and Dempster kept the scores forceful and often on the move: bouncing from one speaker to another around the hall.