Merce Cunningham Dance Films: Screening of Variations V and Channels/Inserts
Bowerbird is pleased to present an evening of dance film screenings by Merce Cunningham with scores by David Tudor and John Cage.
PROGRAM:
Variations V (1966) | 49:05, black & white, sound, 16 mm film on video
Choreography: Merce Cunningham. Director: Arne Arnbom
Channels/Inserts (1982) | 31:40 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
Choreography: Merce Cunningham. Direction/Editing: Charles Atlas
ABOUT THE FILMS
First composed and performed in 1965, Variations V is a true testament to 1960’s experiments with “intermedia”—a coexistence and cutting across of artistic genres that profoundly informed Cunningham’s choreographic practice. Video is materially integrated into the performance, with projections by Stan VanDerBeek and overlaid TV distortions by Nam June Paik enveloping the dancers. Twelve sound-sensitive electronic poles dot the stage; sound is triggered by the dancers’ movements and then altered or delayed by the musicians. Variations V predates Cunningham’s “video-dances,” demonstrating a different moment in his relation to the technology.
A kind of explicit, corporeal engagement with video as medium is reflected in the performance’s sound component. Sound, like video, exists in this dance visually and even kinetically. The viewer of this 1966 archival performance gains access to the locus of sound production, seeing John Cage and David Tudor perched over a wide spread of electronic equipment. Cunningham pays attention to the musicians’ movements in his 1968 book Changes: Notes on Choreography, their “constant scuttling” moving “back and forth on the platform to fix things, wiring that came out, a plug, etc.” The performance moves dialectically between its phenomenological whole and the “varied” elements of sound, video and dance that constitute it.
Unlike most of Cage and Cunningham’s collaborations, sound and movement are more technically codependent than autonomous in Variations V. Cunningham writes in Changes, “John decided to find out if there might not be ways that sound could be affected by movement, and he and David Tudor proceeded to find out that there were.”
To create Channels/Inserts, Cunningham and Atlas divided the Cunningham Dance Company’s Westbeth studio into sixteen possible areas for dancing and used chance methods based on the I Ching to determine the order in which these spaces would be used, the number of dancers to be seen, and the events that would occur in each space. Atlas employed cross-cutting and animated mattes or wipes to indicate a simultaneity of dance events occurring in different spaces, as well as to allow for diversity in the continuity of the image. The sound score is a recording of David Tudor’s PHONEMES.
Dancers are dressed in everyday clothing and at times stop dancing to congregate casually. This cessation, of course, is legible neither as dance nor “not-dance,” but is in-between and liminal, pointing to Cunningham’s persistent interest in “pedestrian” movement. Movement, the choreographer seems to indicate, exists in a continual tension—the everyday appears in the dance phrase and the dance phrase appears in the everyday, or bear each other’s traces. The dancing body is always-already an everyday body and in turn, the everyday body always-already contains the potential for movement read as dance.
This event is part of A VIEW FROM INSIDE: DAVID TUDOR AT 100, an exhibition at Drexel’s Pearlstein Gallery from January 15 to March 21, 2026.
Major support for A View from Inside has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
with additional support from the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia.
Admission is FREE