A careful, collaborative spectacle

ARTWALK

IT TAKES ONE of the world's greatest choreographers to take in art for what the artists produce and create a collaborative spectacle that no one can predict at the outset.

Merce Cunnigham, choreographer and visionary, has worked with artists several times to deepen the experience of dancing, seeing the dancing and creating artworks. That's what you begin to realise as you see a current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in north Miami, itself a treat in this pulsating city.

Artists who design for dance and theatre often tend to state this as an aside, as a secondary accoutrement to the movement of the dancers. Unless they are well known, their artworks remain silently like inert spectators at the back end.

Merce subverted that when he invited artists whom he could work with. The artists then visualised how the dancers would interact with their work. With all this, a work would be created. Rarely, if ever, was it a "set", consigned to being "unobstrusive".

On the contrary, the manner in which the collaboration was mutually imagined, unleashed its energies as a work of art on stage, whose real moment and shape at birth are clear only as it takes place. The way this really worked was that each player "" the artist, Merce and the musician, would work on their own, with only the sparsest briefing from Merce, coming together in the end.

When Merce and Rei Kawakubo, the incredible Comme des Garcons designer joined hands, the outcome was thick striped outfits that bulged like pregnant cells in unlikely places. If you wore them, you'd have a tube like hump on the back, for example.

Dancers who moved would become optical illusions, familiar and un-familiar at the same time. This uncertainty works with Merce's own mode of production. He rarely sequenced each module, and allowed for spontaneous patterns of discovery and presentation.

In another partnership, Charles Long's beautiful bright giant creatures were sculpted to be standing on stage. Each beast, three-legged and at least three times taller than most of the dancers would have been, worked as a counterpoint to the dancers own movements, on one leg or both. Was it anything like dancing among the Bollywood trees, I wonder?

Even more dramatically, for another performance, Ernesto Neto created a galaxy of smooth, rounded stalactites oozing out of an ethereal white fabric. As the light changed its colours, the giant work, hung overhead, transformed.

The breakdown of watertight categories has been spectacularly successful. Not only are the ideas of the set challenged, but the ideas of display too. Seeing much of this in MOCA was, in fact, something like a double entendre, a joke on the ease and the comfort with which a viewer might walk into a gallery space.

These exchanges were never just one-off experiments and pilot projects. They were a process of careful search and cross-collaboration. In fact, for the most part, the company has had stellar artists to serve as artistic directors "" Robert Rauschenberg succeeded by Jasper Johns, for example.

To be able to formally institutionalise the artist within a dance company points to the sheer wonderous nature of this artistry without walls.