Dance may seem an unlikely activity for cyberspace-after all, the human body is the glory of dance–but in 1989 Cunningham found a new muse in a software program known as LifeForms. Created at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C., LifeForms permits a choreographer to create movement sequences on a humanlike figure made of concentric circles, and view him on screen from all sides. Another screen, with multiple figures, can show the overall patterns. “It’s exactly like Petipa,” says Cunningham, referring to the 19th-century choreographer of “Sleeping Beauty” and other sumptuous ballets. “He used cut-out dolls, which he moved around on a table. With his eye, he would have realized immediately that this kind of thing was possible.”
Cunningham, 75, has always been out front with the latest in dance making, creating movement without reference to music, plot or emotion. Often he uses chance–tossing a coin, throwing the I Ching to determine the sequence. It’s the dancers (including Cunningham himself, who still performs) who give his pristine abstractions their warmth and light. What he likes about LifeForms is that it prompts so many new ideas. “You might make a sequence with things in it that are physically impossible,” he says. “But in the course of checking this out on the dancers, you see something that you hadn’t known was there.”
The technology doesn’t yet exist for Seq Ed to dance with a partner. “You could show a lift on the computer, but the computer doesn’t know how to distribute the weight,” says Thecla Schiphorst, one of the programs creators. She and her colleagues at work improving LifeForms, to a great extent in response to Cunningham’s needs.
Although some dance students make use of LifeForms, so far only a handful of young choreographers has joined Cunningham on this frontier. But he is convinced that others will catch up. “People think if they learn something as technical and rigid as they think this is, that they’re losing something,” he says. “I don’t think that way. I like the idea of adventure.” Will LifeForms replace real dancers? “It’s a tool with which I can experiment, but one never thinks of not using dancers in the work,” he says. “They’re the blood of it.”
