I use the computer as a tool. Like chance or the camera or the other tools I've used, it can open my eye to other ways of seeing or of making dances. It's not simply to do a trick.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that technology is a means to enhance creativity rather than just a gimmick.
Merce Cunningham highlights the role of computers as tools in the creative process, similar to how dancers use various instruments to explore and express themselves in new ways. He suggests that the computer, like chance and the camera, can broaden one's perspective and facilitate artistic expression, rather than being merely a technological trick.
In practice
During a lecture on modern dance techniques, one could use this quote to illustrate the integration of technology in artistic expression.
The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.
Movement is expressive. I've never denied that. I don't think there's such a thing as abstract dance.
I think the thing that we agreed to so many years ago, actually, was that the music didn't have to support the dance nor the dance illustrate the music, but they could be two things going on at the same time.
My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day.
I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday.
The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.
That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.
If you can actually get someone to sit on the edge of their seat and feel nervous if there's a knock at the door, then you've done something pretty terrific as a writer.
When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.