Translating the magic of Merce Cunningham’s avant garde choreography into 3D film

While 3D film is viewed by some as an unnecessary gimmick, the technology inspired Russian director Alla Kovgan to make Cunningham, a 3D ode to the avant-garde American choreographer, released late last year and currently showing in UK cinemas. “I always said I wanted to make something about Merce Cunningham because he’s a choreographer who works with space so much. He’ll have 16 dancers going in different directions at the same time, meaning you cannot make a single shot as a filmmaker,” she tells SLEEK over the phone.. “When 3D came out, specifically Wim Wenders’ film Pina”—another 3D dance documentary celebrating the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch after her passing in 2009—“that was the first time I thought that 3D and dance have a lot of potential. It means you can feel really close to the dancers and experience the distance between people and spaces.” 

Famed for developing a signature style of movement combining balletic leg motions with modern dance-inspired torsos, which is now used as a formal method of training for contemporary dancers around the world, Merce Cuningham collaborated with some of the most famous artists of the 20th century including Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, as well as lifelong romantic partner and frequent collaborator, avant-garde composer John Cage. Employing chance principles—such as only bringing together his choreography with the soundscore on the night of the performance—and abandoning narrative in favour of exploring physical questions and concepts, his work was initially shunned by audiences as emotionless, inhuman and cold, before receiving widespread recognition.

Cunningham focuses on the period before the artist became a dance icon, subverting the documentary film genre in the process. “In traditional documentaries you learn a lot of biographical information about who the artist is but you have very little experience of the work itself,”  says Kovgan. “We decided to warp this idea and put the work first.” As a result, Cunningham feels more like an assemblage of artistic evidence than a chronological documentary. The audience are presented with a range of archival footage of Cunningham’s works, choreographed between 1942-1972, as well as audio clips and newly recorded dance excerpts showing dancers performing in a variety of locations: in colourful unitards on New York rooftops, in green woodlands, abandoned warehouses, in front of grand European palaces and in classical theatre contexts. 

Much like in Cunningham’s work itself, the film refuses simple interpretations, instead asking the viewer to draw their own conclusions. This may seem like a tall order for cinemagoers who are not used to watching avant-garde performances, but Kovgan has tried to make the film as accessible as possible. “I always joke that we are teaching the viewer to appreciate dance,” she says. “At first, the dance sequences we show are short. Then, they become longer and longer, so that by RainForest,”—a 1968 work featuring silver, floating pillows designed by Andy Warhol—“you’re watching almost four and a half minutes of uninterrupted dance.”  

When asked why a documentary about Merce Cunningham is relevant today, Kovgan offers a succinct reply: “well, I mean, he’s timeless.” She later adds, “We are a generation of people who are very visually apt as we are constantly bombarded with imagery from all possible sides. So, I think Cunningham is relevant now because he collaborated with so many artists who made his work very visual.” She does, however, admit that dance film is an intense medium that might not be for everyone. “Dance is a complex art form that requires our kinaesthetic empathy. It’s a very embodied experience that some people prefer not to partake in. Ultimately, it’s a reminder of our mortality”. But this isn’t going to stop her from pursuing her goal of bringing physicality back to cinema, as Kovgan says so herself, “cinema was born to dance.”