This excerpt is from a 45 minute Merce Cunningham piece: Biped (1999). (First performed: Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Berkeley California)
Cunningham uses chance operations as a collaborative style. Artists work independently to produce a certain length of music or dance, and then they come together. For Biped, Cunningham collaborated with music, costume, and visual artists. Pail Keiser and Shelley Eshkar developed a video motion capture technique to produce the effect of digital bodies echoing the live dancers onstage. Gavin Bryars produced the music, which paralleled the conceptual idea of the dance: live performers with electronic equivalents for each instrument. Gavin Bryars was a contemporary of John Cage—Cage had collaborated with Cunningham for decades.
At the Merce Cunningham Dance Company homepage, you can read a little bit more about the piece: http://www.merce.org/thecompany_r-biped.html
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