Sounddance (1975)


Music: David Tudor, Untitled (1975/1994)
Décor, Lighting, and Costumes: Mark Lancaster

The title is from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “In the beginning was the sounddance.”

Sounddance was first performed in Detroit, Michigan, in March 1975. (The choreography had been included earlier as a work in progress in Events.) Merce Cunningham led the cast of ten dancers. It remained in the repertory until 1980. Staged by Chris Komar and Meg Harper, it was revived in March 1994 at the City Center Theater in New York, with Robert Swinston in Cunningham’s role. The most recent revival, in 2004, was reconstructed by Meg Harper, again with Robert Swinston in Cunningham’s original role. It was filmed, under the direction of Charles Atlas, in June 2006.

In the fall of 1973 Cunningham had spent nine weeks in Paris working with the Ballet of the Paris Opéra, for whom he choreographed Un jour ou deux. This had been a difficult experience, and when he returned to his own company, he has said, “I felt like doing something vigorous, fast, complex.” The dancers emerge one after the other from an opening in the tentlike structure at the back of the stage. Once they enter, they remain on stage until they are swept back into the structure, as though in a wind tunnel. Cunningham was the first to enter, and the last to leave. “The general impression,” he has said, “is of a space observed under a microscope.”

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