Watching the reference video for Merce Cunningham's Loops, I am drawn to Merce's facial expressions or lack thereof. As he has aged, Loops has become smaller and more intimate, moving from full-body performance to finger and wrist movements. I can only image the next step would bring the dance further inward, to the subtle motions of eye, nose, cheeks, mouth. I find this unintentional performance – evoking adaptation in the face of aging, or perhaps the evolution of the artist – more moving than the most precise description of his actual movements.
Commissioned for the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2009 as part of Loops – New Iterations.
Loops
In 2001, the Media Lab held an art exhibition, entitled ID/entity. Organized by Judith Donath, it brought together nationally known new media artists with Media Lab researchers. One of the projects was created by the artist team of Paul Kaiser and Shelly Eshkar, together with Marc Downie of the Media Lab. For their ID/entity project, they motion-captured the renown choreographer Merce Cunningham performing his one person dance, Loops, that he had created as part of his repertoire in 1971. They then wrote software that used the motion-capture data set to create a screen-based abstract digital portrait of Cunningham. In 2008, the Cunningham Foundation and the artists put the data online as open source under a Creative Commons license with the help of the Mellon Foundation. Boston Cyberarts, with the help of the LEF Foundation, asked three artists, Brian Knep, Golan Levin and Casey Reas and one artist team, Sosolimited (Eric Gunther, Justin Manor, and John Rothenberg) to use this opportunity to reinterpret Loops as new artworks for the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival.