“Ocean” won’t fit on a stage: the American premire earlier this month took place in a campus gym at Berkeley. Spaced around the top of the bleachers were 112 musicians, whose instruments emitted sighs, cries and rattles that floated eerily through the air. (Cage’s assistant, Andrew Culver, carried out Cage’s plans for the musical scenario after his death.) Down below, electronic music by David Tudor evoked the howling and gurgling of aquatic life, an aural effect that seemed to nudge the dancers into motion, like seaweed buffeted by currents of water. Choreographing in the round for the first time, Cunningham kept floods of richly detailed movement washing continually over the dancers. “This piece presented all kinds of challenges,” says Cunningham. “It was a matter of allowing for all the possibilities and not stopping to say, “Oh, this won’t work’.” Oh, how beautifully it works.
