John Cage’s Variations V, as presented Friday and Saturday by Mobius Artists Group, didn’t look anything like the original work that was produced in 1965 by Cage, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and a host of other facilitators. It felt like the original, though. Like much of Cage’s work, Variations V wasn’t intended as a perfectable, repeatable opus — rather it was a set of instructions that could be applied in different ways to attain some fairly specific goals. David Miller, who headed the Mobius collaborators, thought of the project as looking back to former representations and materials even as it suggested images for the future.
Cage wanted to experiment with the relation of movement to sound, but being Cage, he wasn’t thinking about anything so simple as a rhythm band. Twelve five-foot-high antennas and 10 light sensors were planted around the stage of New York’s Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center). These devices were set up so that when the dancers moved into range, they triggered various tape recorders, radios, and other electronic equipment set up in full view of the audience. Cage and his fellow technicians manipulated the incoming dancer-generated signals to change the volume, frequency, pitch, and quality of the sound. The " intermedia " performance consisted of the dancers’ visible activity — dancing and mundane tasks — unfolding against an unrelated cacophony of ambient sounds and projections, all overlapping and fading in and out. It was surprising, confusing, endearing, and unlike anything ever seen before.
Cage expected the elements to interpenetrate, he said in his program note, so that " the distinction between dance and music may be somewhat less clear than usual. " To me at the time, the notion that the artist would want to be less clear instead of more clear was momentous. Like much of what Cage was about, it opened up a way to inhabit the modern world.
At Mobius, Variations V took place in two adjoining rooms, with the audience encouraged to move between them. In both the gallery and the inner performance studio two tables were set up with stacks of consoles, tangled wires, slider boards, cue sheets, and arcane black boxes. Each table was presided over by a boy-inventor type who jiggled things and punched in things on keyboards, watching and listening carefully for the results only he could have picked out of the turmoil.
A man sat with his back to the audience, looking at some diagrams on a music stand. Following this score, he’d let out an intermittent yelp or a growl on his trombone. On a TV set in one room and a big screen in the other, tiny snatches of film, verbal titles, test patterns, and editing static played in continuous loops. These visuals were overlaid at times with what seemed to be live film of the performance rotated upside down or overexposed or mispositioned in the camera’s eye. I couldn’t tell whether these live shots were being taken by the guy who was walking around with a video camera or by the apparent audience member who was peeking into a cellphone-sized video or by some automaton lens fixed somewhere in the rafters. And I couldn’t find the source of the red laser that blipped into the dancers’ hair and faces when they crossed a certain spot.
A man with a clipboard stood for a long time at a microphone, observing the room with a responsible, expectant look on his face. After several minutes, he moved off without saying anything. Later he appeared on the other side of the room and blew into a sort of hose connected to a keyboard. Accordion-like sounds joined the mix.
Marjorie Morgan and three other dancers drifted back and forth. In the brighter gallery room, they did a series of gestures standing in different places. The series repeated many times, and each time a certain gesture came up, the dancers were back at the same spot. None of the gestures was long or connected to the others, but the sequence began to make some kind of " sense " as it recurred over and over. Like the words that flashed on the TV screen too quickly to read — each time they came up again in the loop, you caught a bit more of the meaning.
In the darker studio, Jody Weber put on tap shoes and began crossing the floor, scraping her foot over the spaces between the wooden floorboards. This initiated a long dance that the other women joined and then dropped out of one by one. It had very few tapdance steps but rather consisted largely of walking to the same beat. Each woman added her own decorative taps and slides between the beats.
A man with a long wand, longer than a fishing pole, with something — a camera or a sensor — wired onto the end of it, went around the studio dangling the end of the wand near dancers or people in the audience. Later on I noticed him lying down on the floor holding the wand.
For a long time I stood in the doorway between the two rooms. When I turned back to the gallery, the dancers were resting — I was kind of tired by then too — except for Janet Slifka, who was dancing and who seemed to be the most cheerful person there. The audience was seated or standing along two of the walls, looking serious and sedate. Slifka smiled while whistling " Happy Birthday " and jogging in slow motion.
The barrage of noises quieted down, then started up again: trombone blurts, chords from the makeshift accordion, a low-frequency siren, a continuous muffled conversation. Alison Ball rode by on a plastic kid’s tricycle, a nod to Merce Cunningham’s unforgettable exit in the original Variations V. He rode a bicycle around and through the 12 protruding antennas and headed for the stage doorway. With exquisite timing, he reached up for the top of the doorframe. The bike continued out and he hung on the frame like a monkey.
Alison Ball rode her tricycle through both rooms and out, followed by the other dancers, and soon all the noise subsided. The last words on the screen were " Accept leakage feedback etc. "
John Cage was always more interesting to me for his ideas than his music. Variations V is about process, about experimenting to see how a glut of elements and devices can affect one another in one jangling, provocative situation. Marjorie Morgan, who devised the movement structures for the Mobius performance, acknowledges the influence of Deborah Hay, who in turn danced with Cunningham the year before Variations V. They all used the idea of " purposeless play " as a strategy for invoking the dancers’ wit, imagination, and alertness in the making of the dance — and for them, the making of the dance is the dance.
The process-oriented way of working can humanize dancers for the audience, too. Working without the noisy stimulus of competing media, post-Cunningham choreographer Daniel McCusker counts on all his dancers to contribute to the development process, and to the performance. His duet Later with Kaela Lee last weekend at Green Street Studios was like Morgan’s " dance practices " in terms of the immediacy and solicitude that the performers had for each other, though McCusker’s movement is elegantly wrought whereas Morgan’s looks homemade. The lively contact of dancers who work off each other’s moves can serve as a kind of storyboard for the audience when there aren’t any conventional choreographic structures to hang onto.
When McCusker works with a bigger group, as in small door, large room, to Bach’s Second Suite for Unaccompanied Cello (played by Tsao Lun-Lu), and Directions to My House, for eight women in silence, he distinguishes them as individuals. They wear different clothes and dance their own ways according to their diverse body types, but they share the same movement. For some reason, perhaps the low intensity of the movement as phrase follows phrase, instead of being provocative, the dance becomes diffuse.
Merce Cunningham doesn’t prize ego-dancing. His genius has been to show, over his 50-year career, that dancers can captivate us by their dancing alone, without begging for our sympathy or tagging along on the emotional joyride of a piece of music. It seems to me that after Cunningham, a huge problem for modern dance has been how to keep the audience’s attention and still embrace his wise revolution. Christine Bennett, at the Cyclorama over the weekend, was returning to the idea of expressiveness and metaphor, using a minimal and mostly undeveloped movement vocabulary to explore big objects with importance of their own. When the dancers enter an actual building (Inner House) or deliberately enmesh themselves in a cargo net (The Net), their actions can’t help becoming loaded.
All this type of psychologizing was ruled out in Cagean æsthetics. The universe of Variations V is depersonalized, defocused, decontextualized, and, for the audience, destabilizing. You can’t experience a work like that according to any of your former habits. You don’t come away from Variations V with a message, or a massage, but the experience is intense and unique.
