By Maya Sonenberg

In May 1968, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company premiered Walkaround Time, their homage to Marcel Duchamp, that grand Dadaist. The idea for this work had been ignited the previous winter at the sort of dinner party one can only imagine taking place in the New York City artworld of the time, with Duchamp and his wife Teeny, composer John Cage (Cunningham’s life and artistic partner,), and painter Jasper Johns (the company’s artistic advisor) in attendance. While Cage and Teeny played chess, Johns sidled up to Cunningham and asked if he’d be interested in “doing something with the Large Glass,” Duchamp’s famous artwork more formally called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. “Oh, yes,” Cunningham replied immediately, and Duchamp agreed, as long as someone else would do all the work.[1] Johns took on the job of creating the set, consisting of seven clear plastic boxes silkscreened with motifs from The Large Glass. Several of these stood on the stage, while others hung from the rafters. Composer David Berman was enlisted to create the score, titled … for nearly an hour….

Much has been written about the specific ways this dance responds to The Bride…, and Cunningham himself noted that he placed numerous references to the work in his choreography. In the following, I’d like, instead, to consider how Walkaround Time aligns more generally with principles of Dada visual art and poetry, ideas reflected, of course, in Duchamp’s work and in The Large Glass and, most importantly for this essay, in the poetry of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball.

Dada, founded in Europe, largely in response to the horrors of World War I, travelled to New York City along with its proponents Duchamp and Francis Picabia. On both continents, it meant to disrupt conventional aesthetics, the creation of art, the status of art, the nature of art. It rejected mimesis and championed “the flexibility of ambiguity and ambivalence and unresolvedness.”[2] Dada visual art turned to readymades, like Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal submitted to the Society of Independent Artists’ and later exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery; to photomontage, collage, and sculptural collage like Raoul Hausmann’s The Mechanical Head; and to nonrepresentational painting like Picabia’s Joyful Movement: Dances at the Spring [II] . Dada poetry, both written and performed, also used found objects (language in this case), relied on collage and fragmentation, rejected referentiality, and “[emphasized] doing rather than showing.”[3]

In “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” Tristan Tzara urges the use of found text and chance in art creation, instructing us to choose an article from a newspaper, cut out each word individually and place them in a bag, shake the bag gently, take the scraps out one by one, and then copy the words down, conscientiously following the order in which we removed them from the bag.[4] Although Tzara’s own poems don’t exhibit the level of randomness that might result from following those instructions, they are marked by intense focus on collaged images and fragmentation. In “Wise Dance Two,” a verb sometimes creates a surprise of meaning through syntax; it is “the wind’s gradation which tears the linen.” Through most of its lines, however, images—unseen propellers, impassive screws, houses’ spines, orange peels and strings butt up against each other—as in a collage, their connections left to the reader, perhaps guided by the despair expressed by the line “oh safety valve of my emptied soul” or by the ominous final image of trains falling silent. [5]

Hugo Ball performed phonetic poetry dressed in elaborate costumes and accompanied by music which attempted “to restore to poetry the purity of language and instinct despoiled by traditional literary norms.”[6] His poems like “Gadji Beri Bamba”  recreated this experience on the page, spurring the reader to sound out a cascade of alliteration and assonance that separate the sounds of language from meaning: “gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori.”[7]

Cunningham also despoiled traditional artistic norms, decentering the space of the stage, eliminating narrative, relying on chance operations to guide his compositional process, and breaking the connections between movement, décor, and music in his dances, an effect akin to collage. Although Walkaround Time began as an idea shared by the choreographer, set designer, and composer, differing in this regard from most of Cunningham’s work, this dance does contain many of the other ground-breaking, Dada-inflected hallmarks of Cunningham’s work.

Disruption: readymades. Cunningham was fascinated by them, though movements rather than objects or words. He watched people stepping off a curb or children playing: “I suddenly realized they were dancing, you could call it dancing, and yet it wasn’t dancing; I thought that was marvelous.”[8] His Field Dances included movements like swaying back and forth “that anyone could do.”[9] Movements in Walkaround Time’s first half come straight from the warmups done in Cunningham’s classes, movement sequences in the dance’s second half repeat sequences from the first, and the entr’acte, during which the stage lights dimmed and the house lights went up, showed the dancers participating in the readymade activities of relaxing backstage as they might during a real intermission rather than performing choreographed steps. Walkaround Time included utilitarian walking, but also an investigation of walking. When a man and woman in matching blue costumes perform weird exaggerated steps, when a group of dancers lift and freeze another in the middle of his lunge, when a woman elegantly moves forward on relevé, extending a leg slowly before stepping onto it, and when the whole troupe walks in a circle before sitting down behind the set which they have now assembled into a replica of Duchamp’s Bride…, we see an elucidation of walking, that most pedestrian of movements. However, Cunningham’s “ideas about dancing have always included the possibility of both pedestrian movement at one end of the scale, virtuoso movement at the other end and everything in between,”[10] just as Tzara’s poem includes highly lyrical, “poetic” passages along with disruptions of coherence. Berman’s score highlights the idea of the readymade as well, including as it does “various field recordings, including the composer walking around Niagara Falls in the winter of 1968, and the sound of a 1968 VW Beetle in operation.”[11] Duchamp’s readymades put everyday objects in a museum or art gallery, and in doing so disrupted our assumptions about art and art’s place in society. Cunningham’s use of “readymade” movements achieved something similar by putting them on a stage, asking us to question the nature of dance.

Disruption: chance. Although it’s unclear from the choreographic notes whether Cunningham used chance procedures to create Walkaround Time, he often used such methods, though more elaborate ones than Tzara’s instruction to pull individual words from a bag. Cunningham created extensive charts and then tossed pennies as when creating Suite by Chance or used the I Ching when creating Torse to determine the duration, placement, and order of movements. Tzara’s use of chance disrupted language itself, channeling under syntax. Cunningham’s use of chance disrupted his own predilections and patterns, “freeing [his] imagination from its own cliches.”[12] It disruptted his and our expectations about which movements are capable of following one another, creating continuity from the heretofore impossible.

 Disruption: reject representation. “For [Cunningham], the subject of dance [was] dancing itself,” an exploration of movement, dance’s most basic material— much as Ball’s poetry attempted to return language to a state of pure sound. Like the collages by Dada visual artists and the pile up of images in Dada poetry, the multilayered and simultaneous patterns in Walkaround Time ask the audience to see movement directly, unclouded by narrative or proscribed emotion, and to figure out for themselves what they think. Perhaps this, after all, is the most disruptive thing about Cunningham’s work, its refusal to participate or allow its audience to participate in the decaying rules of a stale culture.

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[1] David Vaughn, “’Then I Thought about Marcel…’: Merce Cunninham’s Walkaround Time,” in Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, (a cappella books, 1992), p 67.

[2] Andre Breton, quoted in Mary Ann Caws, “The Object of Dada,” in Dada and Beyond, Vol 1,  ed. Elza Damowicz and Eric Robertson (Rodopi, 2011), p 77.

[3] John D. Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art (Twayne Publishers, 1984), p 85.

[4] Tristan Tzara, “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” in Tristan Tzara: Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans and ed. Barbara Wright. (John Calder, 1977), p 39.

[5] Tristan Tzara, “Wise Dance Two,” The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry, Translated and ed. Willard Bohn, (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), p 217.

[6] John D. Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art (Twayne Publishers, 1984), p 97

[7] Hugo Ball, “Badji Beri Bimba,” The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry, Translated and ed. Willard Bohn, (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), p 37.

[8] Merce Cunningham, interview by Jacqueline Lesschaeve in  The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve (Marion Boyars, 1991), p 73.

[9] Merce Cunningham, interview by Jacqueline Lesschaeve in The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve (Marion Boyars, 1991), 100.

[10] Merce Cunningham, interview by Jacqueline Lesschaeve in The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve (Marion Boyars, 1991), p 152

[11] Music Overview, Dance Capsule for Walkaround Time (1968), Merce Cunningham Trust

[12] Merce Cunningham, “The Impermanent Art,” in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Prometheus Books, 1989), 312.

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Maya Sonenberg’s essays on Merce Cunningham are supported by the Merce Cunningham Trust and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and have appeared in Gulf Coast, Gargoyle, and other journals and anthologies. Her books include After the Death of Shostakovich Père (nonfiction) and story collections which received the Drue Heinz and Sullivan Prizes. She is a professor at the University of Washington.