In collaboration with Merce Cunningham, Atlas Films produced Fractions I in 1977. In Fractions I we are able to recognize how Cunningham’s movement has evolved from Septet, as well as how technology has taken on a role in his choreography. The movement in Fractions I still features balletic lines from the females and athletic jumps from the males, similar to Septet. Watching the piece you feel as if you are watching a technique class due to the way that phrases are repeated and executed in a very specific manor, as well as in the way the movement develops from beginning to end.
Differing from Septet though, the body has become much more integrated in the movement often moving in contorted ways. This is demonstrated in the section with Lisa Fox where she is executing what may have started out as a simple passe, but it has developed to include the head swinging from side to side, her torso changing shape and moving through multiple planes, her arms freely following the movement of her back, and her leg falling in and out of parallel. In Fractions I we still see male-female partnering, but the personal persona of the dancers is starting to become more abstract.
In Blood Memories, Susan Manning describes Cunningham’s mythic abstraction as making his dancers “… distinct yet interchangeable personae. The dancers’ personae could not be reduced to gendered or sexualized or racialized identities” (Manning 2004: 208). We see this clearly in Fractions | by the way the dancers were choreographed to interact with each other. There is no emotional connection between the dancers, only physical connection that exists out of logistical necessity. It is simply easier for a male to lift a female.
However, the majority of the movement is executed in unison with the ale and female dancers doing the same steps. At any point a dancer could switch places with another dancer regardless of sex, and the dance would remain the same. This ambiguity of the dancers helps to uphold the homosexual closet because it eliminates any narrative an audience might form, and what appears to be traditional partnering keeps the audience from questioning the sexuality of the dancers or the choreographer. Fractions I begins in black and white, but as the dance continues flashes of color become more frequent until there are only brief flashes back to black and white.
Within the camera frame there are television sets, four in total but we do not see all four at all times. Cunningham’s purpose for the television sets was to play with the “… idea of the fragmenting of images among a number of screens – action taking place simultaneously in different areas of the studio was seen on the main screen and also on monitors set up within the range of the main camera” (Kostelanetz, Vaughan 1992: 152). These television sets are vital to understanding both the movement and the literal meaning of the piece.
The television sets act as magnifying glass for the movement. They highlight a specific area on a dancer’s body, so that what we see on the television sets are fractions of the whole dancer that is moving in the space. The television sets also divide the studio up into fractions, so if one phrase is being performed behind the television sets, we may be seeing up to four other phrases happening in other parts of the studio. The television sets allowed Cunningham to play with space and time, and to force his audience to choose what to watch.
With so much movement happening at one time the film can be viewed over and over, with the audience solely focusing on the movement each time. In 1989 Cunningham began to work with the computer animation program Life Forms. As he reached 70 severe arthritis had limited his movement severely, making it challenging for him to stand vertically for an extended length of time. LifeForms made it possible for Cunningham to continue choreographing from a seated position, and by the early 1990s he had become the first internationally renowned choreographer to use the program as a choreographic tool (Copeland 2004: 183).
Cunningham was influenced by technology not only by the effect it has on the humans who use it, but also in how technology can influence movement invention by acting as a partner in the choreographic process. Watching television, for example, influenced the tempos of Cunningham’s work, “The speed with which one catches an image on the television made me introduce into our class work different elements concerned with tempos which added a new dimension to our general class work behavior” (Copeland 2004: 188).
Technology also influenced the titles Cunningham gave his work, the length of the phrases he choreographed became longer, and the movement started to reflect the concentriccircle shaped figures of Life Forms (Copeland 2004: 189-190). Duets also started to become less frequent in Cunningham’s work from the 1990s due to the difficulty of creating them on the program, and as this happened Cunningham’s dancers started to become more and more ambiguous and increasingly abstract.
