All Roads Lead to Westbeth: Merce Cunningham, Charles Atlas, and The Kitchen at Westbeth

From its inception, Westbeth has been a place of many firsts, housing technological innovations that would later catalyze cultural transformation. Initially, the West Village building complex we know today as Westbeth Artist Housing was erected in 1868 to house the manufacturing company Western Electric(2). Three decades later, the company Bell Laboratories took over its occupancy. Throughout its tenure in the complex, Bell Labs developed several technological innovations, most notably inventing the first sound film system in 1926 and conducting the first television broadcast in 1927.

When Bell Labs relocated to New Jersey from New York City in 1966 the complex was left without a tenant. That is until the J. M. Kaplan Foundation and Roger Stevens of the National Endowment for the Arts funded its renovation into a 383-unit living and working space specifically for artists(5). In 1970 Westbeth Artist Housing opened its doors, aptly named so given its location at the intersection of West and Bethune Streets. This remodeling stands as an early instance of adaptive reuse architecture in the U.S., a mode of revitalizing a building that has been carried on by successors such as The High Line in New York City and MASS MoCA. To this day, the mission of the Westbeth building complex is to provide affordable housing and working facilities for artists and their families.

Around the time of Westbeth’s transformation into a home for art, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was in search of a new one. Cunningham founded his namesake ensemble in 1953 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, building upon his prior performance experience with choreographer Martha Graham to amplify the possibilities of dance in modernity. His company eventually moved to New York City in the early 1960s, first to the top floor of The Living Theater Building, then to a precarious space at 498 Third Avenue(7). Anxious to escape their deteriorating studio, the company’s archivist, David Vaughan, sought a tour of Westbeth after seeing an ad for it in the New York Observer(8). Though out of their price point, with the assistance of a three-year grant from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, the company was able to afford a residency at Westbeth commencing in 1971(9). The site became their headquarters until the company’s dissolution in 2012.

Westbeth proved to be an opportune incubator for the work of Cunningham and his dancers, not just logistically but creatively. The sheer space Westbeth afforded the company along with a unique riverside view through its quintessentially expansive windows fostered deep contemplation about the dances being choreographed and how to innovate the dancers’ relation to movement(10). Westbeth’s intrinsic history as a manufacturing hub was made physical by its interior quirks, and thus became inescapable for the company’s artistic process. In a 2007 interview with the Westbeth Oral History project, Cunningham comments on the spatial attributes of his Westbeth studio, even remarking, “That was part of the adventure of [Westbeth] … Not only where it was situated in Manhattan, but what it was."(11) Though its geography in the far westbound reaches of Manhattan was a concern for showcase attendance, Cunningham’s studio location at Westbeth ended up having the inverse effect instead. Its odd latitudinal distance across town contributed to audience allure for the company’s avant-garde creations.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s move into Westbeth set a precedent for the kinds of tenants the building desired: not only artists and their families but also arts organizations themselves.(12) As such, eventually others of the latter kind moved in, such as the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, the New School for Drama, and, most recently, The Kitchen.

In 1973, a 24-year-old Charles Atlas—then an assistant stage manager for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—began recording a dress rehearsal of Cunningham’s work Walkaround Time (1968). Atlas experimented with zooming the camera and framing the dancers in a variety of shots, directing the perception of the choreography in his own way. Though the original dance score was designed for the stage and not the camera, Atlas drafted his own filmic connection to it through his cinematographical interventions, by revealing angles and views of the piece that are otherwise inaccessible from a stage audience perspective.

Atlas’s footage soon became its own individual work, Walkaround Time (1973)(13), and consequently prompted a curiosity in Cunningham, who was garnering an interest in technology and specifically video at the time. He approached Atlas in hopes of creating more video works of his dance projects, ultimately designating him the videographer-in-residence for his company.

The first formal collaboration—and experimentation—that sprouted from this knighting was produced in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company studio space. Eponymously named for the company’s homebase, Westbeth (1975) is a dance authored by Cunningham specifically oriented towards Atlas’s camera(14). In turn, Atlas positioned his filming of the project relative to the dancers, almost creating his own choreography in order to adequately capture his subjects. The pair’s goal for their creative union was to configure a new perception of dance through video, and simultaneously learn about video through the process.

The title of Westbeth is not just a reference to its setting. In fact, the studio plays its own role in the work. The video opens with a point-of-view shot of entering the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, thus bringing the viewer directly to where the work is set, followed by the dancers entering the room. In between images of the dancers’ movements, Atlas interpolated images of the studio space. He also oscillated the sound of the film between a characteristic quietness, revealing the gentle hum of the room, and the sound of the dancers landing on the ground reverberating off the studio walls. At times, the sound output does not exactly match the movements we see, implying that there is dancing occurring out of view and thus translating the invisible portions of the studio space into a sonic topography. Westbeth concludes with the space taking center stage, as a dancer unveils the building’s iconic windows behind a curtain.

Via the usage of the Westbeth arena in Westbeth, Atlas accomplished an immersion in the dance that is distinct from a typical audience viewing. The intimacy of the site as a working space for the company facilitated Atlas’s proximity to the dancers, and consequently the proximity of his footage. Viewers are able to travel through Westbeth while the dancers lead the way, as Atlas follows their paths and inserts the camera’s perspective right in the midst of it all. The work brought its spectators into the dance—almost making them a part of it as a result.

Westbeth as site bears a significance on Westbeth as artwork, and this influence was explicitly invoked in the work’s first-ever presentation. The video premiered in 1975 at its original filming location, right in the Westbeth studio, and featured a live performance of the choreography in addition to the screening. Staging the Westbeth choreography alongside the film on site elucidated the dancers’ relation to the studio space in real time, and therefore underscored the necessity of its venue for the work. Creating the film at Westbeth was not merely a matter of circumstance—it is resolute locality.

Although Atlas’s Walkaround Time caught dance on video, Westbeth truly merged the two mediums. Both the camera and the movement bear equal parts to the work, their alliance jointly posited by Cunningham and Atlas as mutualistic. Westbeth is neither a dance on film nor a film about dance, but a compositive work only possible through both mediums. This collaboration birthed the “media-dance” genre—or dance works made solely for the camera—that later became a staple of Atlas’s filmmaking, especially when working in conjunction with Cunningham.(15)

The essence of media-dance is most immediately rooted in the synchronization of the dancers’ movements and the camera. This connection is contingent on where the work is actually shot, as the area of the space determines (a) how the dancers move and (b) how Atlas orients himself to them cinematographically. The quirks of Westbeth were auspiciously conducive to Cunningham and Atlas’s aims for the work. Bringing the viewer into the dance through video footage was realized by bringing them into Westbeth.

Atlas and Cunningham’s media-dance practice continued in subsequent works, such as Channels/Inserts (1982). This work, also filmed at Westbeth, demonstrates a maturation of the techniques initiated in Westbeth. In it, Cunningham and Atlas integrated the expanse of Westbeth more directly. For instance, they taped geometric quadrants on the floor. They also imposed chance rules based on the* I Ching*—the classic Chinese divination text with an order of 64 possible numerical sets—to delegate the dancers’ spatial distribution. Doing so ensured that dancers were not filmed in two places at once, making the film nearly as ephemeral as live performance. In the film, Atlas pans his lens across the studio, hallway, and black box theater the dance company had in Westbeth, filming a variety of angles in the space. The camera actually follows the movements throughout the space, as Atlas utilized a moving camera in lieu of a static one for the work. Occasionally, some of these settings were blended together using crosscutting and special camera effects. Finally, Channels/Inserts has a Westbeth-oriented conclusion: we see a sundown looking out of its windows, which Atlas likens to an atomic bomb.(16)

As Atlas and Cunningham continued to make media-dance work over the course of a decade, their consideration of space took on a more explicit role. Channels/Inserts is emblematic of the importance of both site at large and Westbeth specifically, while Westbeth is its foundational building block. The location of Westbeth serves as the through-line for Atlas and Cunningham’s collaborations, fortifying their multimedia complexity. Westbeth’s existence through all its phases—from product manufacturer to art cultivator—allowed for dance and video to coexist in media-dance without one overtaking the other. Westbeth comprises all its histories, and so too, the layers of media-dance maintain their heterogeneity.

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The work that Atlas and Cunningham pioneered at Westbeth appears several times throughout The Kitchen’s archive, both through the eponymous work itself and others in the media-dance genre it subsequently spawned. The Kitchen screened Walkaround Time in 1981 during a talk entitled “Merce Cunningham: Dance and the Camera” by the dance company’s archivist David Vaughan(17). Atlas’s first retrospective exhibition at The Kitchen in 1980 included a presentation of Westbeth. Both a 1982 group exhibition at The Kitchen, entitled FILMWORKS ‘82(18), and Atlas’s second retrospective at The Kitchen in 2018 featured Channels/Inserts(19).

The contributions of the Westbeth space that radiate from Atlas and Cunningham’s media-dance trajectory provide a serendipitous bridge to The Kitchen’s current residence there. Upon the start of emergency renovations of The Kitchen’s 19th street building, the organization hoped to find a temporary place for its operations. Much like the Merce Cunningham Dance Company did in the 1970s, The Kitchen confronted the growing inaccessibility of dedicated arts space in New York City for both individuals and institutions alike. Westbeth was one of few (if not the only) viable options for The Kitchen’s move. By continuing to provide space for art in a time when the available means become scarcer, Westbeth continues to uphold their ethos of making housing—and overall, studio space—financially feasible for practicing artists and their networks.(20)

Similar to Atlas and Cunningham’s case, Westbeth has since served as an environment of experimentation for The Kitchen’s artists for the last four years. The building has been directly engaged with by artists in order to call back to its past. Studies for Westbeth (2022) by movement artist Juli Brandano—in collaboration with Jade Manns and TK artists Owen Prum, Amelia Koper Heintzelman, and Cayleen Del Rosario(21)—performed a hybrid of improvisational scores and predetermined choreography in the outdoor courtyard of the Westbeth architectural complex. The culminating piece directly references Westbeth as well as Cunningham and Atlas’s additional creations that occurred on site. Studies for Westbeth and other successors of Cunningham and Atlas’s work are emblematic of the avant-garde innovations that endure at Westbeth. The compound of happenings at Westbeth are the foundation from which art is generated.

The histories of Westbeth—its overlapping phases as manufacturer, studio, and home—are omnipotent. They are embedded in its walls, animated by the media-dances of Charles Atlas and Merce Cunningham, and reimagined throughout The Kitchen’s occupancy.