Ascenders & Descenders is a typographic reinterpretation of Merce Cunningham’s dancing hands. From this blog:
The piece is a Cunningham dance work reconstructed from textual deconstructions of other Cunningham dance works. Each finger has an associated excerpt from an article, review, or essay on Cunningham from the last 5 decades. These texts become the “ink” with which each finger manifests its movements. Each text is dynamically typeset in 3 dimensional space along the curves traced by his fingertips.
What, from the outside, appear to be subtle manipulations of the hands become a beautiful tangle of diving flocks and waterfalls of letters. Presenting dance in this way, we hope to get closer to the experience of the dance from the inside out.
I wrote down the names of a lot of the calligraphers, so I could look up their work at home. I’ll be writing about them in the upcoming days. The title of this post is a quote by Paul Klee, mentioned by one of the exhibitors in her statement about her work and her mark-making. (Klee was a master draftsman, and many of his works are elaborated line drawings; he described his technique in these drawings as “taking a line for a walk.”)
