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57
visiting artists often ask to see
them. “Art needs to be seen
and engaged with by the pub-
lic,” he says, “but artists also
need to learn from other art-
ists. We share these objects
whenever we can.” He empha-
sizes that, even in the museum
context, performance-related
acquisitions like these are inex-
tricably tied to their stagecraft
origins and, more important,
bound by the artist’s inten-
tions for their use beyond that.
The artist’s intentions
are safeguarded by the Merce
Cunningham Trust, which
Cunningham founded in 2000
to preserve and maintain the
company’s works and perfor-
mance materials. Many of
these records are contained
in “dance capsules,” digital
archives for each performance
that include scores, costumedesigns, choreographic notes,
rehearsal videos, photographs,
and the like. Patricia Lent, who
danced with the company and
is now the trust’s director of
licensing, describes them as
“virtual shopping bags.”
“If I were going to stage a
dance, what would I need?”
Lent asks. “That’s always been
the organizing principle. As we
developed the dance capsules,
we talked about scholars who
might use it. But it was really
organized with practical needs
of dancers in mind. What would
I want to have at my fingertips?”
What’s more, she says, “the
dance capsules offer us a defini-
tive way of indicating what
exists and what doesn’t. It saves
us looking for materials that
simply aren’t there.” Take an
early piece, The Seasons (1947),
whose dance capsule is as valu-able for what it doesn’t have:
It contains only a couple of
photographs and some of Cun-
ningham’s notes. “While it
might be of scholarly interest,
it’s really not enough informa-
tion to reconstruct the dance,”
Lent says. “It’s impossible for
people to understand what it
was like before the VCR exist-
ed. There are so many works
for which we just don’t have
much [documentary] material.”
She says recordings of the
music are particularly thin.
Sets and costumes are argu-
ably the most reproducible,
Lent says, “but the actual piec-
es are now museum objects.
We can’t touch them.” More-
over, those costumes can’t be
remade easily. Often, she says,
the fabric doesn’t even exist
anymore. She remembers
the restaging of a key work,RainForest (1968), for which
Jasper Johns’ costume designs
had to be remade. “But there’s
no such thing as a perfect recon-
struction,” she says. “When we
pulled the costumes out of stor-
age, there wasn’t a way to tell
who wore which costume. They
often aren’t clearly labeled, so
there can be some strange
switching around.” And the
costumes themselves aren’t
always in good shape – they’re
worn hard.
These objects were not meant
to last forever. “We get as close
as we can, when they need to be
reconstructed,” Lent says. “We
make an authentic attempt at
re-creating what’s there in the
original design notes.” Even with
that faithful attention to detail,
she says, each performance of
these archival works is, by neces-
sity, made anew.left:
A wool-and-corduroy
bodysuit by David Hare
for Mysterious Adventure
(1945).above:
Rauschenberg made
this collapsible back-
drop for Minutiae (first
staged in 1954). It was
his first collaboration
with Cunningham.left:
A costume by painter
Marsha Skinner for
Enter (1992).below:
Swiss-born artist
Sonja Sekula painted
the wool costume for
Dromenon (1947).american craft aug/sept 19 55