Emily Coates

Beyond the Visible: The Legacies of Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch

I learned about Pina Bausch’s death through an e-mail from a woman I hadn’t heard from in years, an American filmmaker who had moved to Sweden to live in the home country of Ingmar Bergman, her greatest influence. It’s a blow to the field, she empathized, adding that she mourned for months after Bergman died. Not much later, I was on tour with Yvonne Rainer in Brazil, where we learned via friends in New York that Merce Cunningham was on his deathbed. Days after we returned, Yvonne sent out an email, subject heading “Merce.” The body of the message read simply, “died today.”

The Poetics of Physics in Dance

As a dance artist who for the past five years has collaborated with a particle physicist, I see several problems in examples of dance-science exchanges that circulate in professional concert dance. The first problem is the excessively literal translation of scientific ideas, which can leave the artistic composition flat and unimagined. In an exchange we shared at Yale last fall (2015), William Kentridge noted the creative wall that literalism can quickly hit, explaining, “You’re stuck running around and around your studio in circles to simulate a collider.” The second danger exists when an artist is unable to bend her choreographic style to absorb the encounter with science. In this case, the spectacle of the performance overwhelms the scientific point of departure, as Kryptonite overwhelmed Superman. The only remnant of scientific reference lives in the publicity material; the dance looks like any other work by that artist. A third danger lies in representing the scientific object as a cliché: to signify the quantum world, for instance, a production turns to darkness, flashing lights, vaguely extraterrestrial-looking unitards, and trembling. This list is not comprehensive—there are other pitfalls I could mention. It is rather a starting point from which to articulate what a more successful poetics of physics in dance might look like in the twenty-first century.