What’s Dance Got to Do With It?

At eighty-eight years old and confined to a wheelchair, Merce Cunningham choreographed John Cage’s masterpiece 4’33’’. The British artist Tacita Dean created a video installation of the performance, which shows the seemingly immobile choreographer from three different angles. With close attention, however, the viewer will notice that Cunningham is, at times, moving his hand slightly and trembling throughout most of the performance. Just as Cage’s silence is not complete, Cunningham’s immobility is only partial. For as long as ears are listening, noise is created, and for as long as life inhabits a body, movement persists. But while watching Craneway Event, I wondered what exactly the collaboration of an artist like Dean offered to the dimensions of Cunningham’s and Cage’s work. More broadly, the question remained: What precisely can the dimension of dance offer to that of art and vice versa?

A few years ago, Laura McLean Ferris wrote an essay about the collaboration of artists, choreographers, and musicians. She noted that dance had become the main avenue of artistic exploration for many contemporary artists, such as Pablo Bronstein, Mike Kelley, and, perhaps more significantly, Tino Sehgal.¹ 1 - Laura McLean Ferris, “Let’s Dance” in Art Review, October 2010, www.artreview.com/profiles/blogs/let-s-dance, accessed January 4, 2013. In her essay McLean Ferris questions why, after more than four decades, institutions and artists have restored this collaborative practice; she wonders what it is about our particular time that has made it relevant again for various disciplines to work together? For Ferris, the answer resides in the particular shift of interest creative professionals. In more recent times, Ferris argues, the interest of artists has shifted to a more behavioural exploration as the exhibition Move at the Hayward Gallery seemed to suggest. Artists aim to decipher the reasons behind the way we interact with each other within designed spaces and cities.² 2 - Ibid. I would argue that rather than testifying to a shift of interest as such, the practice of an artist such as Sehgal demonstrates the evolution of artistic aspirations found in the 1960s. In fact, Sehgal’s interest in Conceptual art dates back to his first project as an artist, Instead of Allowing Something to Rise Up to Your Face Dancing Bruce and Dan and Other Things, in which he loosely appropriated conceptual works by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham.