Mapping Merce

Interesting post from Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
on a Stanford project that collected data on a Merce Cunningham dancer:
"We're looking upside down, inside out, at the human body," said course director Amy Ladd,, MD, professor of orthopedic surgery. "It's not the way any single discipline would frame the study of movement."

Merce Cunningham Dance

An art process in not essentially a natural process; it is an invented one. It can take actions of organization from the way nature functions, but essentially man invents the process. And from or for that process he derives a discipline to make and keep the process functioning. That discipline too is not a natural process. The daily discipline, the continued keeping of the elasticity of the muscles, the continued control of the mind over the body’s actions, the constant hoped-for flow of the spirit into physical movement, both new and renewed, is not a natural way. It is unnatural in its demands on all the sources of energy. But the final synthesis can be a natural one, natural in the sense that the mind, body and spirit function as one.
-Merce Cunningham

photo by Jack Mitchell