CRWDSPCR (1993)


Music: John King, blues 99
Décor, Lighting, Costumes: Mark Lancaster

A full company work for seven women and six men, first performed at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC in July 1993. It remained in the repertory until December 1999. The first performance of the revival, reconstructed by Robert Swinston and Jeannie Steele, was scheduled for January 2007, in Heilbronn, Germany. (The piece was performed briefly by the Royal Swedish Ballet in 2001, staged by Banu Ogan and Thomas Caley.)

The title may be read as “Crowd Spacer” or “Crowds Pacer,” condensed as in computer language. Like all of Cunningham’s dances since 1991, the choreography was developed with the use of the “DanceForms” software. The impression is of nonstop, even frenetic activity, interrupted only by a long, slow solo for a woman. A more vigorous solo is that for a man, who jumps up and down more than two dozen times.

The music, blues 99 by John King, is produced through electronic transformations of the sounds of a Dobro steel guitar, played slide. King has said that Cunningham told him three things about the dance: its length, its title, and that there would be groups of dancers on the stage. This gave him a picture of urban life, and he knew what he had to do. Mark Lancaster’s multi-colored costumes divide the dancers’ bodies into fourteen sections, vertically and horizontally—the idea was suggested by costume designs by the Russian Constructivist painter Kasimir Malevich.

A documentary film by Elliot Caplan of the making of CRWDSPCR, with the same title, was produced by the Cunningham Dance Foundation in 1996.

CRWDSPCR was originally commissioned by the American Dance Festival with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation. The revival is supported through public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

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