MERCE CUNNINGHAM + iPod

Mikel Rouse's music for Merce Cunningham's dance eyeSpace, which I witnessed at the Joyce Theater in New York last night and is playing again tonight, was brilliantly post-Cagean. Cunningham and John Cage, as you know, made a decades-long joint career by making music and dance whose interaction was unplanned. Cage would make 20 minutes of music, Cunningham the same length dance, then just combine them, so that random coincidences could happen beyond the control of the creators. Mikel took the idea a step further - the dancers don't even hear the music, because it's on iPods. So the entire audience sat there listening with headphones to Mikel's music, and because each iPod was on shuffle mode, each audience member was hearing different tracks and experiencing a different accompaniment to Merce's dance.

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