LO Randomness

The randomness artist I will be talking about is Merce Cunningham. Merce Cunningham was a 20th century choreographer who devised his pieces through chance alone. Some of his techniques included prescibing numbers on a die to certain dance moves and created sequences by rolling the die an amount of times. He also often would teach his dances without any music, to allow that to be a random variable separate from the performers’ abilities to do the dance. The dancers would only hear the music for the first time on the day of the performance. Merce Cunningham was wild, I loved how his work centered making dance accessible for all. I see his techniques of chance and randomness as avenues for anyone to choreograph, which I admire greatly. As you can see in the piece that I am linking, “Beach Birds for Camera,” from 1993, the way he devised his pieces allowed for asynchronous and repeated movement from the performers, contributing to his unusual but distinctive style.