剧情介绍：
First composed and performed in 1965, Variations V is a true testament to 1960's experiments with "intermedia"—a coexistence and cutting across of artistic genres that profoundly informed Cunningham's choreographic practice. Video is materially integrated into the performance, with projections by Stan VanDerBeek and overlaid TV distortions by Nam June Paik enveloping the dancers. Twelve sound-sensitive electronic poles dot the stage; sound is triggered by the dancers' movements and then altered or delayed by the musicians. Variations V predates Cunningham's "video-dances," demonstrating a different moment in his relation to the technology.
A kind of explicit, corporeal engagement with video as medium is reflected in the performance's sound component. Sound, like video, exists in this dance visually and even kinetically. The viewer of this 1966 archival performance gains access to the locus of sound production, seeing John Cage and David Tudor perched over a wide spread of electronic equipment. Cunningham pays attention to the musicians' movements in his 1968 book Changes: Notes on Choreography, their "constant scuttling" moving "back and forth on the platform to fix things, wiring that came out, a plug, etc." The performance moves dialectically between its phenomenological whole and the "varied" elements of sound, video and dance that constitute it.
Unlike most of Cage and Cunningham's collaborations, sound and movement are more technically codependent than autonomous in Variations V. Cunningham writes in Changes, "John decided to find out if there might not be ways that sound could be affected by movement, and he and David Tudor proceeded to find out that there were."
The twelve five-foot high, antennae-like poles each have a four-foot spherical sound radius to produce sound as dancers enter it. To further "vary" the composition, each antenna produced a different sound. Billy Klüver of Bell Laboratories devised the second sound source, which entailed photo-electric cells at the bottom of the poles, which trigger sound as dancers' shadows interrupt their light source. Cunningham likens the process to doors opening at a supermarket in turn, deemphasizing the collaboration between dance and sound. He comments how "the dancers triggered a sound but the kind of a sound, how long it might be, or the POSSIBLE REPETITION OF IT WAS CONTROL-led by the musicians," with their oscillators, short-wave radios and tape recorders. Nevertheless, the composition for Variations V was written only after its first performance, the dancers' movement leaving an indelible imprint on the sound.
Cunningham's non-narrative, anti-psychological focus on "dance itself" imposes a relation of kinetic immediacy between the dancers and their environment. There is the actual documentation of the performance and then there is the video that constitutes the performance, which in itself varies in its approach. VanDerBeek and Paik use video differently in Variations V, while both pro
A kind of explicit, corporeal engagement with video as medium is reflected in the performance's sound component. Sound, like video, exists in this dance visually and even kinetically. The viewer of this 1966 archival performance gains access to the locus of sound production, seeing John Cage and David Tudor perched over a wide spread of electronic equipment. Cunningham pays attention to the musicians' movements in his 1968 book Changes: Notes on Choreography, their "constant scuttling" moving "back and forth on the platform to fix things, wiring that came out, a plug, etc." The performance moves dialectically between its phenomenological whole and the "varied" elements of sound, video and dance that constitute it.
Unlike most of Cage and Cunningham's collaborations, sound and movement are more technically codependent than autonomous in Variations V. Cunningham writes in Changes, "John decided to find out if there might not be ways that sound could be affected by movement, and he and David Tudor proceeded to find out that there were."
The twelve five-foot high, antennae-like poles each have a four-foot spherical sound radius to produce sound as dancers enter it. To further "vary" the composition, each antenna produced a different sound. Billy Klüver of Bell Laboratories devised the second sound source, which entailed photo-electric cells at the bottom of the poles, which trigger sound as dancers' shadows interrupt their light source. Cunningham likens the process to doors opening at a supermarket in turn, deemphasizing the collaboration between dance and sound. He comments how "the dancers triggered a sound but the kind of a sound, how long it might be, or the POSSIBLE REPETITION OF IT WAS CONTROL-led by the musicians," with their oscillators, short-wave radios and tape recorders. Nevertheless, the composition for Variations V was written only after its first performance, the dancers' movement leaving an indelible imprint on the sound.
Cunningham's non-narrative, anti-psychological focus on "dance itself" imposes a relation of kinetic immediacy between the dancers and their environment. There is the actual documentation of the performance and then there is the video that constitutes the performance, which in itself varies in its approach. VanDerBeek and Paik use video differently in Variations V, while both pro