Another element to concern the choreographer is that of the visual devices of the theatre.
Most avant-garde creators, true to their interest in the self-sufficiency of pure movement, have tended to dress their dancers in simple lines and solid colors (often black) and to give them a bare cyclorama for a setting.
But Robert Rauschenberg, the neo-dadaist artist, has collaborated with several of them.
He has designed a matching backdrop and costumes of points of color on white for Mr. Cunningham's Summerspace, so that dancers and background merge into a shimmering unity.
For Mr. Taylor's Images And Reflections she made some diaphanous tents that alternately hide and reveal the performer, and a girl's cape lined with grass.
Mr. Nikolais has made a distinctive contribution to the arts of costume and decor.
In fact, he calls his productions dance-theatre works of motion, shape, light, and sound.
To raise the dancer out of his personal, pedestrian self, Mr. Nikolais has experimented with relating him to a larger, environmental orbit.
He began with masks to make the dancer identify himself with the creature he appeared to be.
He went on to use objects -- hoops, poles, capes -- which he employed as extensions of the body of the dancer, who moved with them.
The depersonalization continued as the dancer was further metamorphosed by the play of lights upon his figure.
In each case, the object, the color, even the percussive sounds of the electronic score were designed to become part of the theatrical being of the performer.
The dancer who never loosens her hold on a parasol, begins to feel that it is part of herself.
Or, clad from head to toe in fabric stretched over a series of hoops, the performer may well lose his sense of self in being a "finial".
As the dancer is depersonalized, his accouterments are animized, and the combined elements give birth to a new being.
From this being come new movement ideas that utilize dancer and property as a single unit.

Thus, the avant-garde choreographers have extended the scope of materials available for dance composition.
But, since they have rejected both narrative and emotional continuity, how are they to unify the impressive array of materials at their disposal?
Some look deliberately to devices used by creators in the other arts and apply corresponding methods to their own work.
Others, less consciously but quite probably influenced by the trends of the times, experiment with approaches that parallel those of the contemporary poet, painter, and musician.

An approach that has appealed to some choreographers is reminiscent of Charles Olson's statement of the process of projective verse: "one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception".
The creator trusts his intuition to lead him along a path that has internal validity because it mirrors the reality of his experience.
He disdains external restrictions -- conventional syntax, traditional metre.
The unit of form is determined subjectively: "the Heart, by the way of the Breath, to the Line".
The test of form is fidelity to the experience, a gauge also accepted by the abstract expressionist painters.

An earlier but still influential school of painting, surrealism, had suggested the way of dealing with the dream experience, that event in which seemingly incongruous objects are linked together through the curious associations of the subconscious.
The resulting picture might appear a maze of restless confusions and contradictions, but it is more true to life than a portrait of an artificially contrived order.
The contemporary painter tends to depict not the concrete objects of his experience but their essences as revealed in abstractions of their lines, colors, masses, and energies.
He is still concerned, however, with a personal event.
He accepts the accidents of his brushwork because they provide evidence of the vitality of the experience of creation.
The work must be true to both the physical and the spiritual character of the experience.

Some painters have less interest in the experience of the moment, with its attendant urgencies and ambiguities, than in looking beyond the flux of particular impressions to a higher, more serene level of truth.
Rather than putting their trust in ephemeral sensations they seek form in the stable relationships of pure design, which symbolize an order more real than the disorder of the perceptual world.
The concept remains subjective.
But in this approach it is the artist's ultimate insight, rather than his immediate impressions, that gives form to the work.

Others look to more objective devices of order.
The musician employing the serial technique of composition establishes a mathematical system of rotations that, once set in motion, determines the sequence of pitches and even of rhythms and intensities.
The composer may reverse or invert the order of his original set of intervals (or rhythms or dynamic changes).
He may even alter the pattern by applying a scheme of random numbers.
But he cannot order his elements by will, either rational or inspired.
The system works as an impersonal mechanism.
Musicians who use the chance method also exclude subjective control of formal development.
Again, the composer must select his own materials.
But a tossing of coins, with perhaps the added safeguard of reference to the oracles of the I Ching, the Chinese Book Of Changes, dictates the handling of the chosen materials.

Avant-garde choreographers, seeking new forms of continuity for their new vocabulary of movements, have turned to similar approaches.
Some let dances take their form from the experience of creation.
According to Katherine Litz, "the becoming, the process of realization, is the dance".
The process stipulates that the choreographer sense the quality of the initial movement he has discovered and that he feel the rightness of the quality that is to follow it.
The sequence may involve a sharp contrast: for example, a quiet meditative sway of the body succeeded by a violent leap;
or it may involve more subtle distinctions: the sway may be gradually minimized or enlarged, its rhythmic emphasis may be slightly modified, or it may be transferred to become a movement of only the arms or the head.
Even the least alteration will change the quality.
An exploration of these possible relationships constitutes the process of creation and thereby gives form to the dance.

The approach to the depiction of the experience of creation may be analytic, as it is for Miss Litz, or spontaneous, as it is for Merle Marsicano.
She, too, is concerned with "the becoming, the process of realization", but she does not think in terms of subtle variations of spatial or temporal patterns.
The design is determined emotionally: "I must reach into myself for the spring that will send me catapulting recklessly into the chaos of event with which the dance confronts me".
Looking back, Miss Marsicano feels that her ideas may have been influenced by those of Jackson Pollock.
At one time she felt impelled to make dances that "moved all over the stage", much as Pollock's paintings move violently over the full extent of the canvas.
But her conscious need was to break away from constricting patterns of form, a need to let the experience shape itself.

Midi Garth also believes in subjective continuity that begins with the feeling engendered by an initial movement.
It may be a free front-back swing of the leg, leading to a sideways swing of the arm that develops into a turn and the sensation of taking off from the ground.
This became a dance called Prelude To Flight.
A pervading quality of free lyricism and a building from turns close to the ground towards jumps into the air gives the work its central focus.

Alwin Nikolais objects to art as an outpouring of personal emotion.
He seeks to make his dancers more "godlike" by relating them to the impersonal elements of shape, light, color, and sound.
If his dancers are sometimes made to look as if they might be creatures from Mars, this is consistent with his intention of placing them in the orbit of another world, a world in which they are freed of their pedestrian identities.
It is through the metamorphosed dancer that the germ of form is discovered.
In his recognition of his impersonal self the dancer moves, and this self, in the "first revealed stroke of its existence", states the theme from which all else must follow.
The theme may be the formation of a shape from which other shapes evolve.
It may be a reaction to a percussive sound, the following movements constituting further reactions.
It may establish the relation of the figure of the dancer to light and color, in which case changes in the light or color will set off a kaleidescope of visual designs.
Unconcerned with the practical function of his actions, the dancer is engrossed exclusively in their "motional content".
Movements unfold freely because they are uninhibited by emotional bias or purposive drive.
But the metamorphosis must come first.

Though he is also concerned with freeing dance from pedestrian modes of activity, Merce Cunningham has selected a very different method for achieving his aim.
He rejects all subjectively motivated continuity, any line of action related to the concept of cause and effect.
He bases his approach on the belief that anything can follow anything.
An order can be chanced rather than chosen, and this approach produces an experience that is "free and discovered rather than bound and remembered".
Thus, there is freshness not only in the individual movements of the dance but in the shape of their continuity as well.
Chance, he finds, enables him to create "a world beyond imagination".
He cites with pleasure the comment of a lady, who exclaimed after a concert: "Why, it's extremely interesting.
But I would never have thought of it myself".

The sequence of movements in a Cunningham dance is unlike any sequence to be seen in life.
At one side of the stage a dancer jumps excitedly;
nearby, another sits motionless, while still another is twirling an umbrella.
A man and a girl happen to meet;
they look straight at the audience, not at each other.
He lifts her, puts her down, and walks off, neither pleased nor disturbed, as if nothing had happened.
If one dancer slaps another, the victim may do a pirouette, sit down, or offer his assailant a fork and spoon.
Events occur without apparent reason.
Their consequences are irrelevant -- or there are no consequences at all.

The sequence is determined by chance, and Mr. Cunningham makes use of any one of several chance devices.
He may toss coins;
he may take slips of paper from a grab bag.
The answers derived by these means may determine not only the temporal organization of the dance but also its spatial design, special slips designating the location on the stage where the movement is to be performed.
The other variables include the dancer who is to perform the movement and the length of time he is to take in its performance.
The only factors that are personally set by the choreographer are the movements themselves, the number of the dancers, and the approximate total duration of the dance.
The "approximate" is important, because even after the order of the work has been established by the chance method, the result is not inviolable.
Each performance may be different.
If a work is divided into several large segments, a last-minute drawing of random numbers may determine the order of the segments for any particular performance.
And any sequence can not only change its positions in the work but can even be eliminated from it altogether.

Mr. Cunningham tries not to cheat the chance method;
he adheres to its dictates as faithfully as he can.
However, there is always the possibility that chance will make demands the dancers find impossible to execute.
Then the choreographer must arbitrate.
He must rearrange matters so that two performers do not bump into each other.
He must construct transitions so that a dancer who is told to lie prone one second and to leap wildly the next will have some physical preparation for the leap.