[Dramatic music]
[Narrator] "Merce Cunningham is a
dancer and a choreographer.
And I think he was probably one of the most
visionary and influential choreographers
the world has known."
[Kovgan] In the film, he also says
any movement is good for dancing, right?
I mean, he was an elitist.
He was part of the American avant-garde,
but he was really interested in movement.
And that's why he says,
"I'm a dancer first."
This idea of communicating through
the physical action is really something
that was very important to him,
and he just was devoted to that, and dedicated.
I think that dance is an underdog of all the art forms,
just by the nature of it, because
you have to be there to see the performance,
and when you're there, you see the performance
and then it's gone.
And that's why people don't know him
as well as they know Rauschenberg or Warhol,
or all these artists he worked with -
you know, Jasper Johns... There's just so many.
But because you can just go in the museum,
and you can see a picture or a painting over and over again,
you can listen to a piece of music - there's a recording.
But dance... nobody watches dance videos
or rehearsal videos.
So I think, by the nature of the art form,
dance is an underdog.
So that was a... With this film,
it's probably a quest of my whole life
to try a way to communicate, to bring this
art form to people.
[Cunningham] "We don't interpret something,
we present something.
We do something, and then any kind of
interpretation is left up to anybody
looking at it in the audience."
[Kovgan] Since we've picked a period
between '42 and '72... Merce was incredibly
prolific, so within that 30 years,
he made 80 dances.
Some of them survived.
Some of them, basically, disappeared.
So we went through most of them.
But there were some iconic ones.
Most of them have to do with
collaboration with Rauschenberg,
because that's the era of the...
They made, like, 16 collaborations at that time, out of 22.
So we basically picked iconic works,
and then from those iconic works,
we picked excerpts.
And then we were trying to translate
his ideas, not his dances, but his ideas into cinema.
And if, again, you start thinking about that,
how would cinema deal with falling?
How would cinema deal with closeness or togetherness?
How would cinema deal with layering, and so on?
Some of those pieces - like, one piece
is based on Dostoevsky.
So it's: what is that like?
And why is it?
We just went deeply in each dance,
and then we tried to find locations
that would help translate his ideas into cinema.
[Dramatic music]
I mean, to me, the most cinematic role
that really worked, it's The Winter Branch.
It's the one on the rooftop, because
something happened there.
It turned into real cinema.
It just even went away
from the dance, and I really try to
get this away from the dance world from the stage.
It's not about being on stage.
It's about something else.
And I think that dance really crossed over.
[Wind whooshing, no music]
[Kovgan] I've been making dance films for
maybe over 15 years, and there's a difference
between capturing dance and engaging with cinema.
Right?
So what I've been trying to do is,
we think about Merce in this film in cinema terms.
There's a people who engage with cinema.
And I think that's the way, basically,
to bring dance to the audience.
It's never gonna be the same as on stage,
and nobody pretends to be.
It's not an opposition.
It's about finding another art form.
And I think that's actually exciting,
and cinema has proven it over and over again.
[Dramatic string music]